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B Y THE SAME A UTHOR. 

tiLO^y HyE GOT OtJR BIgLE. 

An Answer to Qi^^stions Suggested by the New Ee- 
vision. Fourth edition. Fortieth thousand. 12mo, cloth, 
with six illustrations, 125 pages. Price, 50 cents. 

" It has the glow of a story. . . My interest never flagged from 
first page to the last."— Bishop of Deebt. 

" This book supplies a real need. . , We are truly thankful to 
the author for the simple yet exhaustive methods he has adopted in 
bringing the whole history of the origin of our Bible to the under- 
standing of the people."— CAm^mn Commonwealth. 

"This volume is partly historical, partly bibliographical, and 
partly critical. . . Anybody can understand it, and everybody 
would be better for the thoughtful study of it."— Christian Advocate. 

"Gives an excellent and comprehensive account for poptilar 
reading of the ancient manuscripts of the Bible."— TAe Christian 
World. 

"It ought to find its way into our Training Colleges, Bible Classes, 
and Upper Classes in Schools."— Ecclesiastical Gazette. 

"This little volume is indispensable to the Bible reader who 
wishes to have in small compass an account of ancient manuscripts 
and early versions."— TAe Christian. 

THE OLI) pOClJiVIENTS 

AND THE NEW BIBLE. A History of the Old Testa- 
ment for the People. By J. P. Smyth, A.B., LL.B., etc. 

The Old Testament. Old Hebrew Documents. Other Old 
Hebrew Documents and their use in Biblical Criticism. 
The New Bible. A Specimen of Biblical Criticism. Ten 
illu:«trations, showing original manuscripts, Moabite 
Stone, etc. , etc. 214 pages, with Index, 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 
Seventh thousand. 

" A work of sound scholarship and useful criticism."— Pro/essor 
Church History, University of Glasgow. 

"Much impressed by the range of knowledge it displays, and by 
the vigor and clearness by which the subject is presented."— Rev. w. 
Sandat, Professor of Exegesis, Exeter College, Oxford. 

"I find the work itself most interesting. I have rarely seen the 
faculty of lucid exposition more conspicuously displayed."— Rt. Hon. 

W. E. GLADSXOlfE. 

"I think I may venture to predict a great sale, for it is eminently 
valuable, and contains a quantity of information which until now has 
not been popularized."— Rev. Dr. Salmon, Provost Trinity College, 
Dublin. 

" Students of the Bible, and Christians throughout the world, are 
deeply interested in the questions raised in this carefully compiled 
and lucidly written book. It is a timely publication."— ietcesfer 
Journal, May 9. 

"A perusal of this volume will amply repav Sunday-school 
teachers and others . . . will be found a valuable help in their 
study and teaching of Holy Bcri-^ivnQ. "—Manchester Courier, 
April 10. 

NEW YORK: 

JAMES POTT & CO., PUBLISHERS, 

14 AND 16 ASTOR PLACE. 



HOW GOD INSPIRED 
THE BIBLE 



Cl^0ug]^ts f0r i\it "^xtBtni ^mcpxut 



J. PATEESOIT SMYTH 

RECTOR OF CHRIST CHURCH, KINGSTOWN, AND AUTHOR OF 
"HOW WE GOT OUR BIBLE" 



( 

NEW YORK 
JAMES POTT & COMPANY y^^C^/X 
14 AND 16 AsTOR Place 2 C^ 

1892 



M 



^A-^' 
^^^ 



Copyright, 1893, by 
JAMES POTT & CO, 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 027056 



INTEODUCTOEY LETTEE. 

Reader, 

These "thoughts for the present disquiet" 
are intended especially for those who are disquieted. 
There are many good men to whom the notions, 
learned half unconsciously at a Christian mother^s 
knee, are very dear and sufficiently true for the 
guidance of life— many to whom newer views would 
be but a source of disturbance. It is perhaps not 
needful for them to inquire any farther. Let them 
rest in peace, feeding on God's green pastures 
beside His still waters. 

But let them remember that it is not given to 
all men thus to rest, and that restlessness, as well 
as rest, may be a gift of God, His path to a higher 
knowledge of truth. If they feel pained at the 
presenting here of doubts and difficulties unfamiliar 
to themselves, let me assure them that there is a 
very large public indeed to whom they are only too 
familiar, and who, for want of plain speaking about 
them, are often perilously near to making ship- 
wreck of their faith. 



IV INTROD UCTOR Y LETTER. 

It is quite true that in trying to help these 
there is a danger of suggesting difficulties to others 
who have never thought of them before. But this 
is a danger inseparable from any attempt of this 
kind, and I have no hesitation in incurring the 
responsibility of it. These are not the days for 
Christian teachers to hold their peace and risk the 
faith of one-half of their people by humouring the 
mistaken views of the other half, through fear of 
disquieting them. There is nothing to be known 
about the Bible that need disquiet sensible people, 
and even if there were, " it is never safe,"' as Martin 
Luther said long ago, "to do anything against the 
truth." ^ 

J. PATERSON SMYTH. 

Christ Church Vicarage, Kingstown, Ireland, 

August, 1892. 



' It should be kept in mind that this book is not written for 
scholars and theologians, but for ordinary people who have 
doubts and misgivings about the subjects here discussed. It is 
an expansion of the Lent Lectures delivered by the writer this 
year in his own Parish Church. 



CONTENTS. 



IXTRODUCTORY LETTER 



PAGB 

iii 



ISook $. 

THE PRESENT DISQUIET AND ITS REMEDY. 

CHAPTER I. 
DISQUIET. 



I. 

11. 
III. 
IV. 

V. 



I. 

II. 
III. 
IV. 

V. 



The *' Problem of the Day" 

The Disquieted Thinker 

The Secularist 

The Biblical Scholar . 

The Orthodox Controversialist 

Why is this Disquiet Especially in Our Day? 

CHAPTER II. 

REASSURANCE. 



Is THE Bible Safe ? . . . 
"A Great Cloud of Witnesses" 
The Witness of the Book Itself 
The Witness of Christ 
The Witness of its Power . 



CHAPTER HI. 
POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 



I. Is Disquiet an Evil ? . 
II. On "Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie 



1 
3 

4 
6 

7 
10 



13 
15 
25 
35 
37 



41 
43 



VI CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

III. The Confidence of Scholars .... 44 

IV. The Bible through Coloured Spectacles . . 45 
V. Danger of Popular Notions of Inspiration . 46 

Vl. A Challenge 51 

VII. Are we Bound to any Theory of Inspiration ? 53 



CHAPTER ly. 

HOW TO FORM TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

I. The Wrong Way 58 

II. The Right Way 03 

CHAPTER V. 
HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

I. The Jews 70 

II. The Early Church 72 

III. The Middle Ages 78 

IV. The Reformation 80 

V. In Modern Days 85 



Book m. 

HOW OOD INSPIRED THE BIBLE. 
Introduction 91 

CHAPTER I. 

WHAT IS INSPIRATION 9 

I. What is Inspiration ? 94 

II. Revelation and Inspiration 97 



CONTENTS. vu 

CHAPTER II. 



THE TWO EXTREMES. 

PAGE 

Introductory 100 

I. Natural Inspiration 101 

{a) How Far is it True? . , . .102 
(6) What the Writers Thought of Their 

Inspiration 103 

(c) Other Considerations .... 107 

II. Verbal Inspiration 108 



CHAPTER III. 

THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

I. The Human Element in Inspiration . . . 113 

II. Value of the Human Element .... 117 

III. Evil of Ignoring the Human Element . . 120 

IV. The Divine Mingling with the Human . . 124 
V. The Nature of Christ and the Nature of the 

Bible 126 



CHAPTER IV. 

IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE ? 



I. What Human Theories Claim 






129 


II. What the Scriptures Claim 






. 131 


III. What Common-Sense Claims 






135 


IV. The Purpose of Scripture . 






137 


V. Its Method of Teaching 






140 


VI. What Infallibility is Needed . 






142 


VII. Is the Bible Infallible ? . 






143 


nil. Danger of Popular Notions of Infallibility 


144 


IX. A Caution 


, 




146 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 
PROGRESSIVENESS OF GOD'S TEACHING. 

PAGE 

I. The Moral Difficulties of the Old Testament 148 
II. A Rational Method of Education . . .150 

III. First Illustration 153 

IV. Second Illustration 154 

V. Brahmin Development — an Illustration . . 157 

VI. The Education of the Race .... 158 

VII. The School of God 159 

VIII. Back to the Moral Difficulties . . . 162 

IX. The Danger of Ignoring Progressive Teaching 169 

X. Objections and Answers 172 

XI. Conclusion 178 

CHAPTER VI. 

INSPIRATION AND THE "HIGHER CRITICISM." 



I. The Higher Criticism . 
II. Illustrations of the Higher Criticism 

III. An Unreasonable Panic 

IV. Dangers of the Higher Criticism 
V. The True Position of "Criticism" 

VI. Are its Results to be Feared? . 
VII. A Reasonable Attitude 



180 
183 
186 
191 
193 
197 
203 



CHAPTER VII. 
Conclusion 306 



Book f. 



Sl)c |]r£0€nt JDiaqnut anb its Eemcirg. 



CHAPTER I. 

DISQUIET. 

The " Problem of the Day." 

The burning question of the day in the so-called 
" religious world," and indeed in an increasingly- 
large circle without it as well, is that of the true 
position of the Bible. Many men are everywhere 
asking, though perhaps not always asking aloud : 
What of the claims of the Bible, what of its inspi- 
ration ? How far is it human in its origin ? How 
far is it Divine ? How far is it infallible ? Is it 
merely the word of " holy men of old," or is its 
every utterance literally " the Word of God " ? 

Never was there more interest, more inquiry, and, 
I fear I must add, more disquiet amongst thought- 
ful people with regard to these questions. Men 
are no longer satisfied with the old answers to them. 
It is foolishness to talk of the danger and unwis- 
dom of publicly discussing them now. Even if it 
were right to ignore them, they cannot be ignored. 



2 DISQUIET. 

They are no longer questions confined to critics and 
theologians, or discussed only in abs1«ruse, inaccessi- 
ble books. Our popular magazines and religious 
newspapers continually refer to them. The public 
are freely taken into the confidence of scholars, 
and taught all, and often more than all, that these 
scholars know themselves. 

At all times such questions have occupied men's 
minds as they thought about certain problems pre- 
sented by the Bible. But they have in the main 
been shirked and put aside as too difficult or too 
irreverent. That can never be again. There is 
a freedom and fearlessness about these questions 
to-day which demands that they shall be answered 
one way or another. There has come to us a crisis in 
the history of the Bible, a crisis through which our 
generation must pass — amid strife and heart-burn- 
ings, it may be — amid doubts and fears for the 
future of religion — but whose results will ultimately 
be the enthroning of the Bible in a position firmer 
and more lasting than it has ever held before in the 
hearts of Christian people. 

All such crises are from the hand of God, part 
of His method of guiding the world's progress. 
The history of religious thought is but a record of 
such crises. Whenever a truth has in course of 
time become encrusted with error, it is by thus 
shaking and disturbing men's beliefs that the evil 



DISQUIET, 3 

is to be remedied. " Yet once more " God is thus 
shaking the popular notions about the Bible : "And 
this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of 
those things that are shaken, . . . that the things 
lohich cannot he shalcen may remain.'^'' ^ 

Let us watch this process now that is going on 
around us. Let us note the various groups that 
are, some of them unconsciously, working out for 
the Bible the good purposes of God. 

I. 

The Disquieted Thinker. 

Let us first regard the large and rapidly growing^ 
class for which primarily this book is being written 
— the thoughtful religious man who is disquieted 
about his Bible because he has had to break with 
the traditional view of it, and has not yet been able 
to find any other. Let us believe, as we are bound 
to do in the case of every honest thinker, that his 
rising disquiet and dissatisfaction are but the means 
through which the God of truth is helping him 

1 Heb. xii. 27. 

^ A writer in the London Times of January 7th, describes 
them as "this great third party of enormous numbers, and 
rolling on like a snow-ball;" and another of the 14th says, 
" I belong to that vast party. I was brought up in the tra- 
ditional beliefs about the Bible, and I have suffered the ex- 
quisite pain of finding my Bible slipping from me." 



4 DISQUIET, 

to higher truth. Let as notice how his attitude 
toward the Bible is affected by the different phases 
of thought with which he comes in contact. 

" I do not reject or disbelieve the Bible," he says. 
" Far from it. But my mind is disturbed about it. 
My faith in it is shaken. I read some expressions 
of its inspired men that seem to me very far below 
the standard of Christ. I hear of discrepancies in its 
history, of contradictions to established decisions of 
science, of crudeness and imperfection in its early 
moral teaching, of compiling and editing and revis- 
ing and re-revising in books that I almost looked on as 
direct from the finger of God. I still try to cling to 
it for comfort and help. I feel that, even if these 
charges be true, it would still remain the most mar- 
vellous book in the world. But I am perplexed and 
disquieted. I hardly know what to believe about it. 
I have lost that perfect unquestioning confidence 
which used to be such a comfort in turning to its 
pages. 

II. 

The Secularist. 

" And recently my difficulties have grown sharper 
and more defined. I know something of the secu- 
larist propaganda throughout England. I meet with 
men who are secularists and infidels, some of them 



DISQUIET. 5 

with rancorous bitterness against all religion ; but 
some of them, too, with sad and honest hearts, who 
seem fearlessly seeking the truth alone. And I 
notice that their chief difficulties are connected 
with the Bible. If ever I glance at the weekly 
accounts of secularist lectures in the large towns of 
England, if I meet with the common literature of 
the infidel press, everywhere I find that the Bible 
forms the chief object of attack. The gibe and the 
sneer, and sometimes, I must confess, the earnest, 
powerful argument, are directed against difficulties 
which seem presented by the Bible. Some of these 
difficulties are such as have long ago spontaneous- 
ly presented themselves to my own mind, and I 
have tried to forget them or leave them unread. I 
have thought it best to 'let sleeping dogs lie.' But 
they will not lie any longer now. These Bible 
assailants have roused them with a vengeance. The 
laugh is raised at the ' Christian superstition which 
believes in the stupendous miracle of the stopping 
of the universe that Joshua might complete his 
A'ictory over the Canaanites.' With mocking em- 
phasis are read the * words of the loving God,' ' O 
daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh 
and dasheth thy little ones against the stones ! ' 

*' I feel myself cringe as I hear such expressions 
launched with vigour and earnestness into an au- 
dience of working-men who have been taught to 



6 DI8QUIET, 

regard the Bible just as I have been taught, and 
as the lecturer himself was taught in his child- 
hood. And I cannot see, at least from their point 
of view and mine, how such difficulties are to be 
answered. 



III. 

The Biblical Scholar. 

" But another influence, and from a very different 
quarter, has still more affected my beliefs. I find 
things subversive of many of my notions about the 
Bible put forward by men who are no sceptics or 
scoffers or enemies of religion, but who seem to 
have reverently and for many years investigated 
the phenomena of the Bible. They are professors 
in the universities, bishops and dignitaries in the 
Church, men of distinguished scholarship, of un- 
doubted piety, of widely differing schools of reli- 
gious opinion. I gather that they cannot regard 
the Bible as they did in their childhood, and as it 
is popularly regarded by thousands of holy men 
and women to-day. They find more of the human 
in it, they say, though not, when rightly understood, 
less of the Divine. They think it has more in com- 
mon with other books than is generally believed, 
especially in the writings of the Old Testament. 
They think it quite possible for the ancient au- 



DISQUIET. 7 

thors to have made crude and incorrect statements 
in science and history. They point out the lower 
morality of the Old Testament as compared with the 
New. They find traces of a much freer literary 
treatment of the books than is consistent, certainly 
with my notions of inspiration. 

" In the face of all this I feel it almost impossible 
to hold the notions about the Bible which I have been 
taught ; and yet to give up these seems to me to give 
up the Divine authority of Scripture altogether." 

IV. 

The Orthodox Controversialist. 

Let us trace a little further this doubter's experi- 
ence, and see what help in his disquiet he receives 
from his religious friends. This is usually what 
we shall find. Some of them are modest, simple 
Christians who live much in communion with God, 
who regard the Bible as the sacred source of their 
comfort and strength, and shrink sensitively from 
the free and often flippant criticism to which nowa- 
days it is so frequently subjected. They regard their 
friend's disquiet as a temptation of Satan ; one that 
has attempted an entrance into their own hearts at 
times and troubled them sorely. It is a trial of his 
faith, they say ; he must resolutely turn away his 
thoughts from such subjects ; he must earnestly 



8 DISQUIET. 

fight those doubts upon his knees. And though 
they cannot satisfy him, yet somehow their simple 
faith brings him comfort and hope. He sees that 
they are not very logical, but he sees, too, that the 
Bible has been a great power in their lives ; that 
they are away up on the heights with God in a 
region where difficulties such as his have scarce 
power to disquiet ; and almost unconsciously to him- 
self his faith is strengthened and helped by theirs. 

Others of them are — let me draw from the life, 
from one of the best specimens I know of those who 
hold the traditional views of inspiration — thought- 
ful, clear-minded, godly men, who can read and in- 
terest themselves in the main questions about the 
Bible, but without any perceptible doubt or uneasi- 
ness to themselves, partly on account of their placid 
disposition ; partly through their finding so much of 
the holy and beautiful in Scripture that they never 
trouble themselves about difficulties at all ; partly, 
too, because through that delightful inconsistency 
by which so many a man escapes the conclusions of 
his premises, they can loosely hold the popular views 
of inspiration and yet j)leasantly slip out of the diffi- 
culties when they come. But such as these cannot 
help my disquieted thinker. 

Lastly come those satisfied, self-confident men who 
are *' cock-sure" of everything, who never think of 
holding their judgment in suspense. Some of my 



DISQUIET. 9 

readers will recognize the class — men who have never 
troubled themselves much with real thinking, who 
have never doubted and never investigated, who con- 
sider religion itself bound up with their notions of 
inspiration, and thus fearfully peril all faith in the 
Bible. Inspiration, in its Divine largeness and free- 
dom and grandeur, is an idea quite beyond them. 
Their notion is of a sort of rigid superintendence to 
guarantee that each little detail of the Bible history 
shall be absolutely correct; that its science shall be un- 
assailable in the light of the nineteenth century ; that 
its moral teaching in every period shall be perfect. 
To attempt to question this is, in their opinion, to 
endanger the whole foundations of religion. Such 
men as these are the chief cause of disquiet, and 
the chief cause of the discredit of the Bible. They 
pledge God^s inspiration, they pledge Christianity 
itself, to the truth of their own mechanical theories. 
They give to the infidel his chief victories over 
religion. They make sad the seeking souls whom 
God has not ihade sad ; they unconsciously make 
void the Word of God by their traditions, teaching 
for doctrines the commandments of men. 

Such are the classes of helpers which an inquirer 
most frequently meets amongst his associates in the 
religious world. Seldom does he discuss these diffi- 
culties with his clergy. Seldom does he happen on 
friends who have themselves fought their way 



10 DISQUIET. 

through difficulties such as his and reached the 
firmer ground where they are safe at rest. 

Therefore the disquiet goes on increasing, none 
the less for being generally subdued and unexpressed. 
To some it soon ceases to give much concern ; to 
others it is positive torture to the end. Who tliat 
knows anything of it can speak lightly of the pain 
and struggle through which many an earnest man has 
won his way to the light at last ? The writer can 
look back on his own early difficulties ; he has known 
something since of the difficulties of others. There 
are still ringing in his ears the recent words of a 
young student from one of our universities, fast 
losing hold of his faith in the Bible. " There are 
hundreds," he said, " of young fellows like me who 
do not want to lose our grasp of the Bible, but we 
can no longer view it as we have been taught to do. 
If there is any way by which we can still hold it and 
treasure it, do our teachers know it ? and if they do, 
why do they not tell us ? " 

V. 

Why is this Disquiet Especially in our Day? 

Why has all this questioning about the Bible 
come especially to us ? Partly because of the rapid 
spread of rationalistic speculation, but chiefly be- 
cause in our age, more than in any age before, the 



DISQUIET. 11 

God :>f truth is giving to men new revelations of 
His truth, in history and science and comparative 
religion, and in the careful study and criticism of 
the Bible. Such revelations, though they cannot 
clash with the truth of Scripture rightly understood, 
yet most certainly can and do clash with many very 
stubborn notions about it, notions which have grown 
in the popular belief to be regarded as part of the 
Scripture itself. The fact is, that for some centuries 
past men have been forcing the Bible into a false 
position, a position perilous to its authority, unwar- 
ranted by its own statements, and, worst of all, in a 
great measure obscuring the real power and beauty 
of its teaching. In the fierce light of modern 
inquiry it is becoming more and more evident that 
this position cannot be maintained, and simple men 
are growing disquieted, thinking the Bible itself to 
be in danger, while those who know better are look- 
ing forward hopefully, even though in some measure 
anxiously too. They know that deep-rooted mis- 
takes and misconc eptions cannot be removed without 
pain and perhaps loss ; but they know, too, that if 
the Bible is to be free to accomplish its work in 
the world, it must at any cost be rescued from its 
present false position. 

May not this rescue be in a certain degree fur- 
thered by the present disquiet ? May not the over- 
throw of some of our cherished beliefs be but a 



12 DISQUIET, 

necessary preparation for further teaching ? May 
not scholar and infidel and doubter and believer be 
working out for the Bible the good purposes of God 
in widening and clearing our notions of His truth ? — 

' ' For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the 
suns." 



CHAPTER II. 

REASSURANCE, 



Is the Bible Safe? 

I do not believe in any effectual remedy for 
doubt and disquiet save through making a man 
face boldly the difficulties that disquiet him. He 
must make up his mind that truth only is to be 
the object of his search ; that he will accept no 
ignoble peace from resting on a foundation that he 
is afraid thoroughly to test.^ A man with real 
faith in the God of Truth would not hesitate to 
investigate to the uttermost the worst of his diffi- 
culties even if it meant the risk of losing his Bible 
altogether. 

But we are not all formed in that heroic mould, 
and though in God's wise discipline it may be 
often good for one to enter into these inquiries 
about the Scriptures with disquieted heart, and half 
afraid lest the result may be the shipwreck of his 

' "I find in the Bible the secret of all truth. All I truly 
know I derive from it ; and yet I would say to every man, 
' Do not believe the Bible if you cannot see that it is true. 
Deal freely, boldly by it. It is a friend and not an enemy. If 
you don't treat it straightforwardly it cannot do its service to 
you.' " — Jas. Hinton, Life, p. 314. 



14 REASSURANCE. 

belief, yet I see no cause why one need do so 
unnecessarily. And therefore I should like to 
pause here at the outset to encourage my disquieted 
thinker by reminding him how little cause there is 
for real apprehension as to the overthrow of his 
belief in inspiration itself. 

Not that I intend to enter in any detail into 
proofs of the fact of inspiration. Such an attempt 
would both make my book too large and also dis- 
tract attention from the main purpose I have in 
view. This book is not written for unbelievers, 
who deny the fact of inspiration, but for Christians 
who, believing in the Bible as a book inspired of 
God, are puzzled and perplexed when they meet 
with facts that seem inconsistent with it. My 
object is to help such as these. My title assumes 
their belief that the Bible is inspired. 

But experience has shown me how easily the 
question, How God inspired the Bible, may pass 
into the further question. Did God inspire the 
Bible at all ? Is not it continually taking place 
in the present disquiet ? And therefore it seems 
advisable at the outset of our inquiry to remind 
men of facts which have been the stronghold of 
others in these passing disquiets, to try to show 
them that all for which we really value the Bible 
is safe from assault, and far above the reach of 
these controversies of to-day. 



REASSURANCE. 15 

II. 
"A Great Cloud of Witnesses." 

If the fear should ever come to you, my reader, 
of the possibility of the Scriptures being dis- 
credited by present-day controversies after having 
been accepted as God-given for three thousand years, 
first pause for a moment and let the full weight of 
the thought press on you of all that is implied in 
the fact that any set of old documents, always open 
to scrutiny and question, should for thousands of 
years have been accepted as of Divine origin, and 
that they should have been yielded to by men as 
an authority to guide their conduct and impose on 
them commands often disagreeable to themselves ; 
that this acceptance and obedience should have been 
chiefly amongst the most thoughtful and highly- 
cultured nations of the world ; that it should have 
gone on, age after age, steadily increasing, and 
never in any age made such marvellous progress as 
in this cultured, enlightened, all-questioning nine- 
teenth century. 

What gave these Scriptures such authority? 
Remember they were only odd separate documents, 
often with hundreds of years intervening between 
them, written by different writers of different 
characters to different people, and under different 
circumstances. Remember that in many cases we 



16 REASSURANCE. 

do not know their origin, or how they assumed 
their present form, or who were their authors. 
And yet somehow we never can reach back into 
history to a time when they were not treasured 
and reverenced among men as in some way at least 
above human productions. There they stand, a 
long chain of records, with one end reaching away 
into the far back past, and the other gathering 
around the feet of Christ. 

And remember especially this, that they were 
selected out by no miracle, that they rest on no 
formal decision of external authority, on no sen- 
tence of Church or Council, or pope or saint, nay, 
not even of the Blessed Lord Himself ; for long 
before He came, for centuries and centuries, there 
they stood, testifying of Him, cherished and rever- 
enced as a message that had come from above '^ at 
sundry times and in divers manners." All study 
of their history shows that their acceptance rested 
on no decision of any external authority. They 
were accepted as of Divine origin for many gen- 
erations before they were gathered into any fixed 
collection. "The Church," said Luther, "cannot 
give more force or authority to a book than it has 
in itself. A Council cannot make that to be Script- 
ure which in its own nature is not Scripture." 

People say that the Great Synagogue, or their 
official descendants, collected the Old Testament 



REASSURANCE. 17 

Canon of Scripture. Yes, but when ? Somewhere 
about the time of our Lord/ when the books had 
been for ages recognized as of God. People say that 
the Christian Church collected the New Testament 
writings into a Bible. Yes, but when ? After they 
had been for three hundred years accepted as the 
God-given guide of the Church. It was not their 
being collected into a Bible that made them of 
authority, but rather the fact of their possessing 
authority made them be collected into a Bible. 

Again, we repeat the question, What gave them 
that authority ? And there seems no possible 
answer but this, that they j)ossessed it of them- 
selves. They commanded the position they held by 
their own power. Men's moral sense and reason 
combined to establish them. They ajDpealed by 
their own intrinsic worth to the God-given moral 
faculty, and the response to that appeal through 
all the ages since is, in reality, the main founda- 
tion of the Bible^s position. 

Look at the Old Testament. If we at the present 
day are asked why we receive it as inspired, we 
usually reply that we receive it on the authority of 
our Lord and His Apostles. They accepted it as the 

^ In the main, the Old Testament Canon was settled long 
before this time. But some few books, as Esther, Ecclesiastes, 
and Canticles, were controverted up to the first Christian 
century. 



18 REASSURANCE. 

Word of God and handed it on to us with their im- 
primatur upon it. Well. But why was it accepted 
before their day without any such formal sanction ? 
How did men come to believe and obey as Divinely 
inspired the words of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah^ Hosea, 
Joel, Amos, Micali and the rest ? Excepting the 
case of Moses there were no miracles or portents, 
no external voice from Heaven to command men^s 
allegiance. They were not established in their Di- 
vine supremacy by any single authority. Why then 
were their utterances accepted ? 

" It seems evident there can be but one answer. 
They asserted that supremacy by their own intrinsic 
claims. Men were compelled to acknowledge that 
their declaration, that Hhe Word of the Lord had 
come to them/ was true. There was that in the 
messages of the Prophets, and in the evidence by 
which they were accompanied, which compelled this 
belief. It was often disputed, and as a rule it was 
vehemently disputed when the Prophets appeared. 
. . . . But nevertheless, the voice of the Prophet, 
the message which he brought from the Lord, was 
recognized by the faithful few in his own time, and 
gradually, but surely, compelled allegiance among 
his people. 

" In this history of tbe Hebrew Scriptures you 
have the clearest and most unquestionable evidence 
of the ground on which the authority of the Scrip- 



REASSURANCE. 19 

tures stands. There was no external authority to 
appeal to. The evidence of miracles was not always 
present, and even when present, it was not by itself 
decisive of the question. The Prophets delivered 
their message as the Word of the Lord, and could 
appeal to no higher authority in authentication of it. 
But that word compelled recognition sooner or later ; 
and the longer the Jewish nation lasted, and the 
more time there was for these sacred books to pro- 
duce their natural impression on the minds of the 
people, the more thoroughly and the more unhesita- 
tingly were they recognized as of Divine origin and 
authority. . . . God's Word had vindicated it- 
self. It had been disputed by hard hearts and 
obstinate minds ; but it had held its own and made 
its way ; it had fulfilled the assurance of the Prophet, 
that ' My word shall not return unto Me void, but it 
shall accomplish that which I please, and shall pros- 
per in the thing whereto I sent it.^ In point of fact, 
men heard a voice, and had to decide from whom it 
came. Were those awful, penetrating utterances of 
men like Jeremiah merely the utterances of a man 
wiser or better than his fellows ? Or were they, as 
the Prophets said, the voice of that God who 
searches our hearts, who is about our path and 
about our bed, and spies out all our ways ? The 
voice had to be assigned to its author ; and the 
more men listened, the less could they doubt that 



20 REASSURANCE. 

the voice was that of G.od. When once this was 
recognized, every solemn utterance of a Prophet who 
had been intrusted with such a message could not but 
be regarded as precious, and treated with the most 
reverent care ; and thus there grew up that collec- 
tion of sacred Scriptures which were received in the 
time of our Lord as embodying His revelation to His 
people. . . . The Books of the New Testament 
became recognized among Christians just as the 
Books of the Old Testament had been recognized 
among the Jews, by virtue of their own inherent 
evidence. Certain witnesses came forward and 
recorded in writing the teaching of our Lord, or 
announced certain messages for which they had His 
authority, or the guidance of His Spirit in commu- 
nicating them to their fellows. Men had to decide 
for themselves whether they believed those claims. 
The Apostles were supported, indeed, in many cases 
by miracles, but not always ; and though those mir- 
acles afforded momentous evidence, they were not 
recognized in themselves, and standing alone, as 
decisive of the whole question. No apparent mir- 
acle, it was felt, could of itself authenticate a mes- 
sage from God, which did not bear internal evidence 
also of having proceeded from Him. The appeal, in 
short, in the early Church was directed, as in the 
time of our Lord Himself, to the hearts and con- 
sciences of men. He Himself could but appeal to 



REASSURANCE. 21 

those hearts and consciences, and men accepted or 
rejected Him, not by reference to any external au- 
thority, but in proportion to their capacity for 
recognizing His Divine character. Thus, from 
first to last, the authority of the Scriptures has 
been equivalent to the authority with which they 
themselves convinced men that they came from 
God." ' 

N^ow is not this a striking testimony to the in- 
spiration of these books ? To be sure we believe 
that all this was the work of God. The Bible was 
not merely chosen by the Church. " The Bible was 
formed, even as the Church itself was formed, by 
the action of that Holy Spirit which was the life of 
both/^ It was His divine working that separated 
certain books for the perpetual instruction of the 
Church. But we must emphasize the fact that the 
mode of His working was by the quickening and 
guiding of human souls that they should choose and 
reverence and love and use that which was most help- 
ful and stimulating to their religious life, that by 
a divine instinct men should at length gradually, 
unconsciously arrive at a general recognition of a 
certain set of writings as authoritative Scripture. 

^ A sermon preached, at Lincolu's-inn Chapel on Sunday 
morning, January 31, 1892, by the Rev. H. Wace, D.D., Prin- 
cipal of King's College, London, and Preacher at Lincoln's-inn. 
The italics are mine. 



22 REASSURANCE. 

Thus the Bible, as it were, formed itself by virtue 
of a divine power inherent in it. It won its own 
way ; it built its own throne. All that was good 
in human consciousness recognized its right to rule 
over men. 

Now this is what I want especially to emphasize, 
that the Bible has evidenced its divine power and 
won its authoritative position by its appeal to the 
judgment and the conscience of many generations. 
Mainly by this appeal it holds its position to-day. 
I have been anxious to show you that the position 
of the Bible rests not on any miracle, on any external 
authority of Church or Council, but on its appeal to 
the minds and consciences of men. You may doubt 
a miracle, you may doubt your individual instincts, 
you may doubt the competency of any one body of 
men. You cannot so easily doubt the conviction 
of a hundred generations. They found in it their 
light and hope and peace. They found in it a 
power to make them good, and they were convinced 
that it had come from God.* 

^ I am quite conscious that I may be pointed to the accept- 
ance of the Koran and the Sacred Books of India as a fact that 
weakens this argument. I have no hesitation in admitting 
that in part the reason of their acceptance, too, lies in their 
appeal to the consciences of men through their containing 
broken rays of " the light that lighteth every man coming into 
the world." I should be sorry to think that Christianity re- 
quired my belief that the God and Father of all men left the 



REASSURANCE. 23 

The Bible, therefore, rests on no foundation that 
can be overthrown by man. Its authority to-day 
rests on the free response to the appeal which it 
makes to the minds and hearts and consciences of 
this generation, strengthened incalculably by the re- 
sults of that same appeal to the minds and hearts and 
consciences of every preceding generation. Through 
all the ages there comes to us the enormous aggre- 
gate of ever accumulating attestation to the book 
from the best and holiest people, the people, there- 
fore, most competent to judge of the value of a book 
of religion. 

Pause now for a moment to take in the full im- 
port of this fact, to feel the force of the con- 
firmation that it gives to the witness in your own 
conscience. Consider then that the power of the 

whole non-Christian world without any light from Himself. 
But surely there is a vast difEerence between the position of 
these books and that of the Bible. All that is good in the 
Koran existed already in Christianity and Judaism, and is mainly 
derived from them ; and besides, it had also the authority of 
Mahomet, an authority frequently enforced by the sword. The 
Sacred Books of India, with their pearls of spiritual truth gleam- 
ing here and there amongst a mass of rubbish, can surely not be 
compared with the Bible in reference to the above argument. 
Their acceptance amongst a lower and more ignorant race, few 
of whom have any real knowledge of their contents, is a very 
different matter from the acceptance of the Bible amongst the 
higher races of the world, amongst people who have it open to 
their constant scrutiny, and to whom its acceptance or rejection 
is felt to involve issues of vital moment. 



24 REASSURANCE. 

Book to-day is greater than ever before. Consider 
also that whatever cause of intellectual or moral 
difficulties men may find in it to-day has always 
been in it and open to the constant scrutiny of all. 
Consider that it has held its authoritative position 
in the face of the most violent attacks all through 
the centuries ; that infidels have overthrown and 
exploded it times without number, with the result 
only that its power has steadily increased, so that 
to-day it would be almost as easy to root the sun out 
of the heavens as to root this Bible out of human 
life. 

Take this single fact as an illustration. A hundred 
years ago Voltaire refuted it quite satisfactorily, 
as it seemed to himself. "In a century," he said, 
" the Bible and Christianity will be things of the 
past." Well, how has his prophecy been fulfilled ? 
Before his day the whole world from the beginning 
of it had not produced six millions of Bibles. In 
the single century since, and that too this enlight- 
ened critical nineteenth century of ours, two hundred 
millions of Bibles and portions of Scripture have 
issued from the press, and there are to-day about 
eighty Bible Societies distributing them through the 
world in nearly every known language of mankind ! 

Marvellous, indeed, if this Book be not Divine ! 
Let the infidel explain these facts if he can. Let 
the disquieted Christian steady himself by the 



REA88UEANCE. 25 

thought of them, and remember that these facts 

EEMAIN UNDISTURBED, HOWEVER MEN^S NOTIONS 
MAY CHANGE ABOUT THE BiBLE. 



ni. 

The Witness of the Book Itself, 

Now turn we to examine this Book itself, and try 
to judge why, in all ages, it has so authoritatively 
appealed to men. Of the external evidence which 
impressed the early Church we are not now in all 
cases competent to judge. We have to accept their 
testimony for that. The internal evidence, the appeal 
to the heart and conscience, " any man that willeth 
to do God^s will " is still able to appreciate. Let us 
glance briefly over the Book. Let us try to judge 
it honestly. Let us not ignore what seem to us 
faults and defects, though they may not have seemed 
so in earlier days. Let us seek fairly its main 
characteristics. 

We find at once this very striking fact, that in 
the midst of the world, and its cares, and its affairs, 
this Book itself is not of the world worldly. It 
deals with the higher world of the soul. It is 
constantly teaching men more or less clearly of God, 
and duty, and righteousness of life. We meet in 
it with thoughts that are altogether beyond the ken 



26 REASSURANCE. 

of this world, thoughts of God's love, of God^s 
fatherhood, of God's forgiveness, of the duty of 
yielding up this life to be lived for Him. Could 
such thoughts have come from unaided humanity ? 

1. We find in it a Jewish national history. 
Never surely was national history so extraordinarily 
written. Everything is looked at in relation to God. 
Records of other ancient nations tell of what this 
or that great king accomplished ; how the people 
conquered or were conquered by their enemies. In 
the Jewish records everything is of God. It was 
God who conquered, God who delivered, God who 
punished, God who taught. There is no boasting 
of the national glory, no flattering of the national 
vanity; their greatest sins and disgraces and punish- 
ments are recorded just as fully as their triumphs 
and their joys. 

In the records of other nations the chief stress 
is laid on power, and prosperity, and comfort, and 
wealth. In these strange records goodness seems 
the only thing of importance. To do the right 
seems of infinitely more value than to be powerful, 
or rich, or successful in life. Strange indeed if 
such history- writing be entirely of the earth ! Pity 
that we have not learned such history-writing our- 
selves ! 



REASSURANCE. 27 

2. We hear continually, as it were, a mysterious 
Voice all through the history threatening, encour- 
aging, pleading with an unwilling people. The 
sole business of prophet, and historian, and legis- 
lator seems to be to rebuke men for sin, to incite 
them to holiness, to point them to the sometimes 
but dimly seen ideal of a noble, beautiful life. 
A rare phenomenon, indeed, in the histories of 
nations ! 

Will some one say that this was the natural devel- 
opment of the moral tendencies of the Jewish race ? 
Was it, though ? The race whose most prominent 
tendencies, by their own confession, were idolatry and 
impurity. Remember how unwillingly they received 
that teaching, how rarely they obeyed it, how they 
killed the prophets that declared it to them, how 
they were the " stiff-necked and uncircumcised in 
heart and ears, that did always resist the Holy 
Ghost." Nay, surely not from the natural con- 
sciousness of Israel could such a Voice have 
come. 

3. Look next at the national poems and hymns 
of the peoj^le, the greatest miracle, it seems to me, 
in the whole of the world's history — the miracle 
that old John Bright felt entirely sufficient of itself 
to prove the inspiration of the Bible. I cannot con- 
ceive any honest, earnest unbeliever studying these 



28 BEASSUBANGE, 

carefully and believing them to be but ordinary- 
human productions. 

When I turn to the secular history of the world 
at the time when the Psalms were written, even at 
the lowest date that criticism may assume ; when I 
read of its filthiness and depravity, of its worship of 
images and fetishes, of its degraded conception of God 
and duty ; and when I place that history beside my 
Bible open at the Book of Psalms, it seems to me 
that the veriest infidel should be overwhelmed by 
the contrast. 

*' Have mercy on me, God, after Thy great goodness ; 
according to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine 
offences. Wash me throughly from my wickedness ; 
and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my 
faults, and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee 
only have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight ; 
that Thou mightest be justified in Thy saying, and clear 
when Thou art judged. . . . Turn Thy face from my sins, 
and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, 
God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not 
away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit 
from me. . . . The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit ; 
a broken and contrite heart, God, shalt Thou not 
despise. . . . 

"Praise the Lord, my soul: and all that is within 
me praise His holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul ; 
and forget not all His benefits. Who forgiveth all thy 
sin, and healeth all thine infirmities : who saveth thy 
life from destruction, and crowneth thee with mercy and 
loving-kindness. . . . The Lord is full of compassion and 
mercy, long-suffering, and of great goodness. He will 
not always be chiding ; neither keepeth He His anger 
for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins : nor 



REASSURANCE. 29 

rewarded us according to our wickedness. For look 
how high the heaven is in comparison of the earth : so 
great is His mercy also toward them that fear Him. 
Look how wide the east is from the west : so far hath He 
set our sins from us. Yea, like as a father pitieth his 
own children, even so is the Lord merciful unto them that 
fear Himc For He knoweth whereof we are made : He 
remembereth that we are but dust. . . . 

" The Lord is my Shepherd ; therefore, can I lack 
nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead 
me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert 
my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness 
for His Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the 
valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil ; for 
Thou art with me : Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me. 
Thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the 
days of my life ; and I will dwell in the house of the 
Lord for ever." 

I am not ignoring the imprecatory psalms or any- 
such defects. I shall deal with them later on. 
They are no more than the spots in the sun in this 
magnificent collection. Think that such poems were 
written in the days when Rome was founded, and 
ask your own heart if they came from unaided 
humanity. 

4. And here is another extraordinary fact. We 
find as we examine this Book a series of teachers, 
who could not have been mere fanatics because of 
their calm common-sense, who could not have been 
impostors because of the nobleness of their teach- 
ing and the danger that it exposed them to, yet 



30 BEA88TIBANGE. 

claiming authoritatively to speak for Jehovah. 
They seem to have felt a mysterious Spirit striving 
with their spirit, teaching, enlightening, sometimes 
almost compelling them to speak. Go through the 
whole of the prophetic writings and feel the im- 
pressiveness of that constant iteration, " The Word 
of the Lord,'' "Thus saith the Lord." See at 
times the half-reluctant prophet groaning under 
the weight of " the burden of the Lord," and forced 
sometimes almost against his will to speak the 
pleadings and threatenings of God to the people 
— aye, and doing so often at the risk of his 
life; and when you have done this, ask yourself 
again, Are these the phenomena of ordinary human 
history ? 

5. Another peculiarity of the Book. It predicts 
the future, and its predictions are fulfilled. What 
unaided sage or statesman can do that ? " Who as 
I," saith God, " declareth the thing that shall be ? " 

How shall I select instances where instances are so 
many ? Hear the prophet's stern rebuke to Hezekiah a 
hundred and fifty years before the captivity.* " The 
word of the Lord of Hosts, Behold, the days come 
that all . . . shall be carried to Babylon, nothing 
shall be left. And thy sons shall they take away, 
and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king 
^ Isaiah xxxix. 5. 



REASSURANCE. 31 

of Babylon/^ Hear Micah ^ predict the same cap- 
tivity, and also the deliverance that should after- 
wards come. Read the announcements that Babylon 
should be a desert waste and Nineveh an utter 
desolation, that Tyre should be a rock for the 
spreading of nets, that Israel should be scattered 
among the nations, and Jerusalem trodden down of 
the Gentiles. Were these things but the guesses 
of astute historians, or is the simple Bible testimony 
true that *' Prophecy came not in old time by the 
will of man, but holy men of old spake as they were 
moved by the Holy Ghost " ? 

But these mere national prophecies are unim- . 
portant matters to dwell on. Turn to those that 
called forth the long expectation of the Messiah. 
Every careful student can see that there runs like 
a golden thread through the whole Old Testament 
prophecy the ever deepening conviction that God 
had some great purpose yet in store for His Church, 
something far above Israels life of petty victories, 
and defeats, and captivity, and restoration, and for 
which these little events were only a preparation. 
More or less vaguely there seems always the belief 
that, somehow, somewhen, there would be a fuller 
deliverance, a closer and more real union with God, 
a manifestation of God in present nearness. Here 
and there we find it rising into more definite pre- 
' Micah ii. 10. 



32 REASSURANCE. 

diction ; the prophecy of a seed that should bruise 
the serpent^s head, in whom all the nations of the 
earth should be blessed ; of a prophet like unto 
Moses whom God should raise up ; of a Child born, 
a Son given, whose name should be the Mighty- 
God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace ; 
of a righteous Servant on whom the Lord should lay 
the iniquity of us all ; of Messiah the Prince cut off 
but not for Himself, and of one like a Son of 
Man to whom is given an everlasting kingdom, a 
dominion that shall not pass away ; of the glory of 
the second Temple that should surpass the glory 
of the first ; and many other prophecies of a similar 
kind. And surely it is a striking fact, considering 
the jealously exclusive temper of the Jews, that 
these far-off visions of Messiah jDresented Him as 
the Saviour of the Gentiles also. " Is it a light 
thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up 
the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of 
Israel ? I will also give thee for a light to the 
Gentiles, that thou mayest be for salvation unto the 
ends of the earth/' 

Let men explain these as they will, it is a con- 
fessedly historical fact that amongst the Jews them- 
selves there arose from these prophetic anticipations 
a more or less definite hope of a kingdom and a 
Messiah who should be in some sense Divine. Let 
us candidly ask if such things can be explained 



REASSURANCE. 33 

away. Let critics argue as they please about the 
dates of the books ; they were, at any rate, very long 
prior to Christ. Whence came these predictions if 
not from above ? Would any one venture to call 
them astute guesses about the future ? No reason- 
able man, I think. Certainly no Christian man who 
knows how continually the Lord Himself appealed 
to the old prophecies, to the necessity that all things 
"must be fulfilled which were written in the Law 
of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms 
concerning Him.^' 

6. Last, but not least, notice the marvellous unity 
of spirit through the whole Book. How comes 
it that these diverse compilations, often with cen- 
turies between them, should combine to form one 
harmonious whole if no great Master were direct- 
ing the work? This in itself ought to show their 
inspiration. " If it appears," says Dr. Westcott,^ 
*' that a large collection of fragmentary records, 
written, with few exceptions, without any designed 
connection, at most distant times and under the 
most varied circumstances, yet combines to form a 
definite whole, broadly separated from other books ; 
if it further appear that these different parts, when 
interpreted historically, reveal a gradual progress of 
social spirituai life, uniform at least in its general 
^ Bihle in the Church, p. 15. 



34 REASSURANCE. 

direction ; if, without any intentional purpose, they 
offer not only remarkable coincidences in minute 
details of facts, but also subtle harmonies of com- 
plementary doctrine ; if, in proportion as they are 
felt to be separate, they are felt also to be instinct 
with a common spirit — then it will be readily ac- 
knowledged that, however they came into being 
first, however they were united afterwards into the 
Sacred Volume, they are legibly stamped with the 
Divine seal as ' inspired of God ' in a sense in which 
no other writings are." 

We close here our brief examination of the Book 
itself. Passing over altogether the external attesta- 
tion, we have tried to find the internal power in 
the Scriptures by which they ruled men^s lives for 
three thousand years. With one exception, we have 
glanced only at the lower revelation in the Old 
Testament, because it is the Old Testament chiefly 
that men are questioning to-day, and also because 
whatever is true of its moral and spiritual greatness 
is admittedly true in a far higher degree of the 
New Testament writings. Even in this lower revela- 
tion, in spite of what may seem to us its defects and 
imperfections, we find more than enough to explain 
its appeal to the minds and consciences of men. 

If we keep in mind that in the New Testament 
this appeal is tenfold intensified — that even to this 



REASSURANCE. 35 

day no nation, no single individual, has ever attained 
to the exquisite ideal that it placed before the world 
in the dark da^^s of two thousand years ago — our 
testing of the Bible need proceed no further. We 
shall find unhesitatingly in the intrinsic virtue of 
the Book, the reason of its marvellous vitality and 
power, the mark that it has come to us from God 
Himself. Let its kemember that these eacts 

REMAIN UNDISTURBED, HOWEVER MEn's NOTIONS 
MAY CHANGE ABOUT THE BiBLE. 



IV. 

The Witness of Christ. 

The facts already considered appeal almost as 
much to the infidel as to the Christian. Here I 
appeal to Christians only, and point them to the 
chief, the unassailable ground for every Christian 
man of his belief in the Divine origin of the Bible. 
It is this. That it all centres in Jesus Christ Him- 
self. It cannot be dissociated from Him. It is 
closely, inseparably bound up with His life. 

The Incarnation does not appear as a separate 
solitary event unconnected with the history before 
and after. It appears as the climax in a long 
historical manifestation of God to man recorded in 
the Old Testament, and as the head and source of a 
followino^ and fuller manifestation recorded in the 



36 REASSURANCE. 

New. The Old Testament tells of the preparation 
for Christ. The New Testament tells that when that 
preparation was complete " in the fulness of time 
God sent forth His Son/^ Jesus Christ, as it were, 
stands between them and lays His hand upon them 
both. The Old Testament is the Scriptures which 
He told men were of God and which bare witness 
of Him. The New Testament is the story of His 
words and works, and the teaching of apostles and 
early disciples sent forth by Him as teachers with 
the power of the Holy Ghost. It is this fact that 
Christ is its centre which accounts for the striking 
unity of this collection of separate documents. The 
parts seem all to belong to each other. The Old 
Testament is incomplete looking forward to the 
New, and the New is incomplete looking backward 
to the Old. 

Therefore to him who believes that Jesus Christ 
is God, the Divine origin of the Bible stands safe 
for ever, no matter how his opinion about it may 
have to be modified. 

Let me emphasize this thought by quoting a few 
of the many passages showing how solemnly our 
Lord spoke of the Old Testament as given by God, 
and as a continual preparation for His coming : 

"Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures or the truth 
of God." "They are they which testify of Me." "All 
things that are written in the law of Moses and in the 



REASSURANCE. 37 

prophets and in the Psalms concerning Me. " " This that 
is written must yet be accomplished in Me." "Begin- 
ning at Moses and all the prophets He interpreted to them 
in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." 
" Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the 
builders rejected ?" " This is He of whom it is written, 
Behold, I send My messenger before My face which shall 
prepare My way for Me." 



V. 
The Witness of its Power. 

What shall I say more ? Need I remind you of 
that practical conviction of every earnest Bible 
student, the conviction which Coleridge expresses 
when tie speaks of the way in which it "finds me." 
Men feel by their own spiritual experience that the 
Book witnesses to itself. " The Spirit itself beareth 
witness w^ith their spirit " that the Book is the 
Book of God. It "finds them" as no other book 
ever does. Its words have moved them deeply ; it 
has helped them to be good ; it has mastered their 
wills and gladdened their hearts till the overpower- 
ing conviction has forced itself upon them, Never 
book spake like this Book. 

Need I point you to the world around, to the 
miraculous power which is exercised by that Bible, 
to the evil lives reformed by it, to the noble, 
beautiful lives daily nourished b j it ? Did you ever 
hear of any other book of history, and poems, and 
memoirs, and letters that had this power to turn men 



38 REASSURANCE. 

towards nobleness and righteousness of life ? Did 
you ever hear a man say, "I was an outcast, and a 
reprobate, and a disgrace to all who loved me, till I 
began to read Scott^s poems and Macaulay^s His- 
tory of England " ? Did you ever hear a man tell 
of the peace and hope and power to conquer evil 
which he had won by an earnest study of the Latin 
classics ? 

Well, you can get a great many to say it of the 
study of the Bible, ten thousand times ten thousand, 
and thousands of thousands. You can see the 
amount of happiness and good that has come to the 
world even from the miserably imperfect following of 
it. You can see that the world would be a very para- 
dise of God if it were thoroughly followed. Misery 
and vice would vanish for ever, purity and love and 
unselfish work for others would hold their universal 
sway on earth. The millennium would have begun. 

The Book whose tendency is thus to reproduce 
heaven we may fairly judge to be of heavenly 
birth. The Book whose beautiful ideals no man, 
no nation, has ever yet attained, is surely not of 
ordinary human growth. 

I have but suggested briefly these few thoughts 
of reassurance, the strength and peace of many in 
the controversies of to-day. Need we be disquieted 
about a Book that comes to us thus accredited in so 



REASSURANCE, 39 

many powerful ways ? Can we not see with restful 
hearts that all for which we value it is safe from 
assault ; that, however we may have to modify our 
notions about inspiration, we never can doubt that 
it has come to us from God? 



CHAPTER HI. 

POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

The previous chapter has been written to steady 
and encourage my disquieted thinker by reminding 
him that, however he may have to modify his 
notions of inspiration, the fact itself of inspiration 
is practically safe from assault. Whatever diffi- 
culties he may find in the Bible, at any rate he 
never can believe it to be of mere human origin, 
he never can doubt that it has been so inspired 
by God as no other book in the world has ever 
been. 

This consideration, I think, should enable him 
to face his difficulties boldly. I do not at all ex- 
pect that it will remove those difficulties. He will 
see clearly that the denier of inspiration would 
have a far harder task than the upholder of it, and 
yet he will feel unable to get rid of his difficulties 
as to the Bible being inspired. " I certainly can- 
not believe," he will say, "that the Bible is an 
ordinary uninspired book, yet I cannot get rid of 
my disquiet about its inspiration. I read some 
expressions of its inspired men that seem to me far 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 41 

below the standard of Jesus Christ. I hear of 
discrepancies in its history, of disagreements with 
the established decisions of science, of. crudeness 
and imperfection in its early moral teaching, of 
compiling, and editing, and revising, and re-revis- 
ing in books that I almost looked on as direct from 
the finger of God. How can these things be consist- 
ent with the inspiration of the Spirit of Truth ? ^' 

Now when a man has himself got clear of such 
difficulties, he feels almost impatient of going again 
slowly over the steps by which he has gradually 
attained his own position with regard to this ques- 
tion. And yet it is the wisest way by which to 
lead another. Short-cuts in intellectual processes 
are seldom satisfactory. 

I have referred in an earlier chapter to the way 
in which the disquiet of a thoughtful man as to the 
Bible and inspiration is frequently dealt with by 
mistaken religious friends. Let us see if his diffi- 
culties cannot be met in a more reasonable and re- 
assuring way, that thus he may be helped into a 
position from which he can, with quiet, restful heart, 
examine the question of inspiration for himself. 

I. 
Is Disquiet an Evil? 

It is a commonplace truth enough that religious 
doubt and disquiet are not necessarily evil. And 



42 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

yet it is a truth that needs to be often emphasized 
for the doubting and disquieted. A man's doubt, 
if it be candid, honest doubt,^ may be as much a gift 
of God as other people's belief, and may ultimately 
accomplish as widespread good. Not unwisely has 
the poet said : 

" There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds ; " 

and there are times when it may be sinful to shake 
off such doubt. For men disquieted about the 
Bible such as I am addressing, it would probably 
lead to a vague uneasiness on a wider subject, and 
tend to loosen the foundations of all belief in re- 
ligion and in God. To deny inquiry is but to in- 
crease doubt. Involuntary doubt cannot be sinful, 
for how can that be sinful which a man cannot help ? 
And if he cannot believe, what else can he do but 
doubt? Blessed are they who have no doubts to 
disturb their quiet, but blessed still more are they 
who through doubt and darkness have won their 
way to a higher knowledge of truth. It is the 
highest faith to believe that to those who, with 
humble, honest heart, are seeking the truth at any 
cost, God will give His assistance to find that truth, 
and His pardon if they miss it. " If," says an old 

^ Surely it is not necessary for me here expressly to exclude 
immoral doubt, or that silly boyish affectation that apes the 
doubter because it looks clever to do so. 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 43 

writer, " after using diligence to find truth, we fall 
into error where the Scriptures are not plain, there 
is no danger in it. They that err and tliey that do 
not err shall both be saved." * 



II. 

On '• Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie." 

Therefore one should inquire reverently but fear- 
lessly into the truth about his disquiet. Nothing is 
above Truth in the estimation of God. Truth is 
of God, whether it bring us disquiet or no. And it 
will not ultimately do so if we have faith in it and 
in Him. 

ISTever, then, be content to "let sleeping dogs lie." 
For, first, it is an ignoble thing to do. It shows a 
want of real faith in God and in truth. And it is 
also a dangerous thing to do. For most frequently 
these are the watch-dogs of God to warn you of cor- 
ruption eating into your beliefs. If you try to quiet 
them and keep them sleeping, you will find some day 
that your faith has been corroding unnoticed. And 
besides all this, even for your own quiet's sake it 
is the most foolish way to treat them. If your little 
child is afraid of some bogie in a dark place, he will 
always have misgivings in passing that place, until 
you have gone with him to drag it to the light and 

^ Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants. 



44 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

he sees it is but a white sheet hanging on a pole. 
And if you are afraid of some bogie in the Bible 
that seems to be threatening your religious belief, 
you will always have a secret misgiving until you 
have boldly dragged your bogie to the light. It 
may do you good by showing that your belief 
needed to be corrected ; it may vanish altogether 
when carefully examined by the help of wiser eyes 
than your own. In any case drag it out. Never, 
if you can help it, let sleeping dogs lie. They will 
disturb you continually by growling in their sleep, 
and some day they will spring up and rend you. 



III. 

The Confidence of Scholars. 

When a man has learned that his disquiet may 
possibly be not an evil but a good, not so much 
Satan's temptation as God's method of teaching, a 
further help and reassurance will come to him from 
the reminder that eminent scholars and theologians, 
men of deep and unaffected piety, have been for 
many years familiar with the worst of those facts 
that are so disquieting to him, and that to them 
they never cause any disquiet at all. Whether one 
can understand it or not, it must be a great source 
of confidence to find the closest and ablest criticism 
of the Bible consistent with the deepest faith in its 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 45 

teaching and the strongest conviction that it is 
inspired of God. Nay, more. One finds in inter- 
course with such men that their closer investigation 
has but resulted in making the Bible to them a 
grander and nobler and more God-like book than it 
had ever seemed before. They have shaken off the 
petty theories which hindered their full appreciation 
of its Divineness. They have sought the truth, and 
the truth has made them free. 



IV. 

The Bible through Coloured Spectacles. 

The next ste]? in the removal of his disquiet 
begins with the suspicion that perhaps, after all, it 
is not so much inspiration that is in danger of over- 
throw as the theories that men have made for them- 
selves with regard to it. There are few more 
curious phenomena in the history of human thought 
than this of the pertinacity with which generations 
of sensible men have clung to baseless theories of 
their own about the Bible, and insisted on identify- 
ing the truth of inspiration with the truth of their 
own foolish notions about it. They have, as it 
were, fashioned for themselves coloured spectacles 
through which the Bible is to be read ; they have 
placed them for generations before the eyes of 
their children, and the consequence naturally is 



46 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

that the colour has become identified with the 
Bible itself, and caused false ideas and doubt and 
disquiet. What a relief to a man to learn that it 
is the spectacles and not the Bible that ought to be 
put away ; that the worst of the difficulties and 
disquiet disappear if the Book be but read without 
false preconceptions ! 

One of the greatest dangers to men's faith in the 
Bible will disappear when they realize this simple 
fact. The secularist, equally with his audience, has 
from childhood used coloured spectacles in reading 
the Bible. ISTeither he nor they can conceive any 
other view of it than that which they are accustomed 
to. Therefore his arguments come with the force 
of strong conviction, and their minds are ready to 
feel the full power of them. 

A book of this colour cannot be Divine. 

The Bible is certainly a book of this colour. 

Therefore the Bible cannot be Divine. 

There is no evading the conclusion. No — until 
some one suggests the removal of the glasses, and, 
lo ! arguments and disquiet have both disappeared ! 

V. 

Danger of Popular Notions of Inspiration. 

When the question is asked then, If inspiration be 
so evident, how is it that men find those difficulties 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 47 

in the way of their belief in it ? This is the answer, 
Because they themselves have put those difficulties 
there. TJiey have put in the place of inspiration 
itself certain popular notions as to what inspiration 
should he. They have assumed without the slightest 
warrant that if God inspired the Bible, He must 
have done it in the particular way which appears to 
them the most fitting. It must be verbally inspired, 
or it must be absolutely infallible, or its style and 
language must be faultless, or its religious teaching 
must be perfect from the beginning — at any rate, it 
must be something which in their opinion is neces- 
sary for a book inspired of God. 

God did not tell them anything of the kind, but 
they thought it must be so. It was a pardonable 
mistake. It arose from a deep loving reverence for 
the Bible, and for the God who gave it. But it 
was a mistake all the same, and has resulted in 
serious injury to the Bible. 

Men have taught these notions to their children 
as j)art of the meaning of inspiration. By and by 
these children as they grow up find some part of 
the Book which fails to satisfy these notions, and 
immediately they begin to question its inspiration 
instead of questioning the truth of the notions that 
had been taught them. 

This confounding of inspiration itself with the 
popular notions about inspiration is one of the com- 



48 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

monest mistakes both with believers and unbelievers. 
It is a most instructive study to examine the usual 
infidel attacks upon the Bible, to find that nine- 
tenths of them are directed against what are really 
but popular notions which the more educated Chris- 
tians have long since left behind, and to see good 
men defending these notions with a terrible earnest- 
ness as if religion itself depended on their truth. 

What a source it would be of calm and assurance 
if people would only learn that it is these popular 
Christian superstitions about the Bible that are 
mainly accountable for the present disquiet ; that 
almost every hostile attack that one knows of de- 
rives its strength from the unfounded belief that 
these things are implied in the fact of inspira- 
tion. 

Why, reader, if that be true, does not the worst 
of our difiiculty about the Bible at once disappear ? 
No man would dream of being disappointed at 
the spots on the sun, or of losing his enjoyment 
of an exquisite " Madonna," or " Ecce Homo," be- 
cause of a tiny scratch on the corner of the robe. 
And no earnest man, as he gazed into the wonder 
and glory and beauty of Scripture, could ever be- 
stow a thought on its infinitesimal flaws were it not 
for this, that the existence of even one of them, ac- 
cording to the popular superstition, is impossible in 
a real work of God. He is told not to believe his 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 49 

eyesight ; such flaws are not there. How could they 
be in the image that fell down from heaven ? 

Should it not strengthen a man's heart if one could 
prove to him that such teaching as this is supersti- 
tious and wrong ? The Bible did not fall down from 
heaven. It was not, as the old illuminations picture 
it, copied from golden books held open by angels 
in the sky. It was written by men — men inspired of 
God, it is true, but yet men with human hearts and 
human frailties and human feelings. It was written 
in the most natural way, with exertion of hand and 
heart and brain, as we ourselves would write. We 
know that it came from God in the sense that God 
inspired it for the spiritual guidance of the world ; 
that a noble influence and a Divine teaching ema- 
nated from it. But the fact that it was thus inspired 
of God did not change this living, throbbing, human 
Book into a dead, gilded idol. That is what we have 
done to it. We have bound together into one vol- 
ume, and tried to level into dead uniformity, a number 
of separate waitings, history, poetry, drama, epistle, 
prophecy, parable, written by different writers, of dif- 
ferent temperaments, at different times, with different 
purposes, and, for aught we know, with different de- 
grees of Divine illumination. This collection of living 
utterances given for our use we have almost treated 
as a fetish for our worship. We have attributed to it 
every quality that seemed to us an excellence, without 



50 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

asking whether we had reason for doing so. We 
have made God responsible for its every passing refer- 
ence to history or science — nay, for even the author's 
name at the head of every writing. Thus the intelli- 
gent veneration for a nobly inspired Book has degen- 
erated into a foolish reverence for an idol ; the faith 
that should have assimilated the spirit of the Bible has 
become a superstitious worship of letters and words. 

History shows that this is no unusual thing to 
happen with the objects of men^s reverence. The 
Jewish Rabbis, in their reverence for the Mosaic 
writings, declared that God handed them written to 
Moses from heaven — nay, so perfect, so ineffably 
Divine was the book, that Jehovah Himself spent 
three hours a day in the study of it ! The Moham- 
medans assert of their Koran that it was communi- 
cated direct by the angel Gabriel from the original 
which is preserved in heaven ; that it was written in 
absolutely perfect Arabic ; that every syllable is of 
Divine origin; that it is entirely infallible and author- 
itative on every subject of which it treats ; that it 
has through all the ages been preserved from error 
and from the inaccuracy of copyists by the miracu- 
lous guardianship of God Himself. 

Mere superstition, you say, my reader, of course 
there is no ground for such assertions as these. 
Quite true. But does it not show us the tendency 
of men with regard to any object of great venera- 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 51 

tion, and should it not make us very cautious of 
dealing similarly with the Bible ? 

1 say that we have so dealt with it. We have 
asserted pretty much all these things about it. 
We have claimed for Moses and Paul and Matthew 
more than they ever thought of claiming for them- 
selves. Of course, we thought we should know 
better than they. We have spoiled the life and 
beauty and naturalness of the Book by our super- 
stition about it. And we have so exposed it to 
the assaults of its enemies that the veriest tyro in 
infidelity can find vantage-points from which to 
assail it. 

It should, I repeat, be reassuring to have it im- 
pressed on us that the Bible is not responsible for 
these burdens which men have tied upon it ; it 
should make us less disquieted amid hostile assaults, 
and it should certainly make us resolved to help in 
the overthrow of such superstition, and give room 
for the freer growth of a reverent, intelligent belief 
in the holy oracles of God. 



VI. 
A Challenge. 

And now, reader, before we go further, it seems 
necessary to point out and to challenge distinctly 
the most mischievous of these ^' Popular Notions of 



52 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

Inspiration.'' Up to this we have but accused 
them generally as " Popular Views," or " Traditional 
Notions/' Now, like the knights at the lists of 
Ashby, we have to ride openly at each of the tents, 
and strike with ringing blow and with sharp end of 
the spear the shield of each foe with whom we mean 
to battle, for the sake of the Bible and our dis- 
quieted brethren. 

I. THE THEORY OF VERBAL INSPIRATION, which 

ASSERTS THAT GrOD IS THE AUTHOR OF SCRIPTURE IN THE 
SAME SENSE AS MiLTON IS OF THE '' PaRADISE LoST," 
EVERY CHAPTER, VERSE, WORD, AND LETTER BEING DI- 
RECTLY DICTATED BY HiM. 

II. THE IGNORING OP THE LARGE HUMAN ELE- 
MENT IN INSPIRATION. 

III. THE BELIEF THAT AN INSPIRED BIBLE MUST 

BE ABSOLUTELY INFALLIBLE IN EVERY DE- 
TAIL, EVEN IN SECULAR SUBJECTS. 

IV. THAT THE MORAL AND SPIRITUAL TEACHING 

IN AN INSPIRED BOOK CAN NEVER AT ANY 
PERIOD BE CRUDE AND IMPERFECT. 

V. THAT EDITING OR REVISING, OR MISTAKING 
THE AUTHOR'S NAME, GOES FAR TO DESTROY 
THE INSPIRATION OF A BOOK. 

As we chose the simile of the lists of Ashby, 
so we choose the number of its warriors' tents, 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF IN8PIBATI0N. 53 

and challenge the five that stand in the fore- 
front the chief amongst the Causes of Doubt and 
Disquiet. 

The first is already passing to his end, scarce 
worthy our chivalry to strike him to the ground. 
But the others are strong to do vigorous battle, 
and are cherished in the hearts of many Christian 
people. 

One by one they come before us a little later on.^ 
At present we but challenge them and look them in 
the face, and deliver one more blow before this 
chapter closes. 

VII. 
Are we bound to any Theory of inspiration? 

But it will be asked, Am I not bound to accept 
these beliefs? Does not my belief in inspiration 
compel me to believe that every statement of the 
Bible history is miraculously guaranteed against 
the slightest inaccuracy ; that its writers were infalli- 
bly guarded from mistake in questions of astronomy 
and geology ; that no inspired man could give utter- 
ance to faulty religion or morality ; that every book 
of the Bible is equally valuable ; that every word 
must be understood in its plain, literal sense ; that a 
story like, for instance, that of Satan^'s conversation 

^ Book II., chaps, iii., iv., v., vi., vii. 



54 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

with God about the fate of Job must be an exact 
literal report of what actually occurred, since, of 
course, God could not have inspired for the teaching 
of religious truth a piece of semi-imaginative dra- 
matic poetry ? 

To all which questions I emphatically reply, lN"o. 
Whatever conclusion you come to on such matters, 
your belief in the fact of inspiration need be in 
no wise affected. 

There is, as I have said, a common opinion that 
Christianity is pledged to these and such like par- 
ticular beliefs about the inspiration of the Bible, and 
that if any of these beliefs be called in question, then 
the inspiration of the Bible is in danger of being 
disproved ; nay, even Christianity itself is in peril ! 

But where is it laid down that the nature of inspi- 
ration must be such as to guarantee these things ? 
Absolutely nowhere ! 

Certainly not in the Bible. For, strange as it maiy 
seem at first, a little consideration will show that 
the Bible itself nowhere directs us what we are to 
believe about inspiration. Indeed, the Bible says 
very little of its inspiration at all beyond merely 
asserting the fact. It leaves us entirely to our own 
judgment as to its nature and extent, and as to what 
is involved in the fact of a book being inspired. 

Nor has the Christian Church, the witness and 
keeper of Holy Writ, ever laid down for her chil- 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 55 

dren any theory on the subject. Looking back from 
"the present disquiet," one can hardly miss seeing 
a striking indication of that Divinely promised guid- 
ance which was to be hers for ever. In different 
ages, as we shall see, the belief about inspiration 
varied ; now it was lower, now it was higher. What 
a temptation to the Church of any particular age to 
stereotype for posterity its own theory on a subject 
so important ! — far more important, surely, than 
many of the abstruse theological dogmas on which 
the greatest councils spent their strength. Yet, in 
spite of the enormous importance of the matter, in 
spite of the differences of opinion about it, no creed 
or decree or article of the Church ever made it 
binding on clergy or laity to receive one theory of 
inspiration rather than another. 

If, then, neither the Bible nor the Church has pro- 
nounced on the matter, how dare any man attempt 
to take our liberty away? We can only submit at 
the peril of our faith, for the sharpest attacks of 
infidels and the sorest perplexity of Christians de- 
rive their strength from the wide-spread belief that 
Christianity is committed to certain beliefs in inspi- 
ration. This is not so. We are only bound to be- 
lieve in the fact of inspiration ; we are free to differ 
widely as to what it may involve. 

If we find that there are certain phenomena of 
the Bible which we cannot reconcile with the popu- 



56 POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

lar theories of inspiration, it need be no cause of dis- 
quiet, as these theories may quite possibly be wrong ; 
they only rest on human authority or human assump- 
tion. Our belief in inspiration is bound up with no 
theory ; the main facts of Christianity would remain 
unshaken even if we accepted the lowest theory ever 
seriously propounded. 

Nay, we may go further and say that the funda- 
mental truths of religion are not dependent even on 
the belief in inspiration at all. For example, every 
argument of Butler and Paley would be equally 
cogent to a man who believed in no supernatural 
inspiration, but regarded the evangelists as "four 
men of common honesty and common intelligence." 
The all-important question as to whether Christ so 
lived and spoke and died and rose from the dead 
does not depend at all on their inspiration, but simply 
on whether they were competent and trustworthy 
witnesses. Why do I point out this fact ? Certainly 
not because I wish to under-estimate the importance 
of a firm belief in the inspiration of the Bible. But 
I want to shake loose as far as I can the tenacious 
prejudices which so hinder a candid inquiry into the 
nature and extent of inspiration. I want to empha- 
size the fact that we are quite free to discuss the 
question suggested in this book without any appre- 
hension of disturbing the foundation of our most 
holy faith. To take the most extreme case : even 



_l 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 57 

if we regarded every writing in the Bible as unin- 
spired, we need not for that reason give up our faith ; 
though, of course, the Bible would lose for us enor- 
mously in value. If, then, the foundations of our 
religion are so little dependent on certain popular 
theories of inspiration, if the Bible has left the ques- 
tion open, if the Christian Church during nineteen 
hundred years has never formulated an authoritative 
opinion as to what is implied in the fact of a book's 
being inspired, why should we not feel as free about 
theories of inspiration as we feel about theories of 
the weather or the tides ? 



CHAPTER IV. 

HOW TO FORM TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 



The Wrong Way. 

This is an important subject to deal with, since 
most of the present disquiet results from the wrong 
methods of theorizing practised in the past. The 
wrong method I have especially in view is that very- 
common one of assuming that because we think God 
ought to act in a certain way, therefore God must 
infallibly have done so. This is a very unsafe pro- 
ceeding. For one so often finds that God does not 
do the things we had settled- that He ought to do or 
must do. It has been often pointed out that if 
experience had not taught us the contrary, how very 
confidently we might assume that if God gave man a 
revelation at all, He must have made it accessible to 
all men, or at least that He must have so given it that 
when it did become accessible to any there could be 
little or no danger of misunderstanding its meaning. 
But we find that these assumptions are quite un- 
warranted. We do not make them, simply because 



TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION 59 

they are so clearly disproved by facts. But the 
whole history of inspiration theories is a record of 
assumptions equally unwarranted which were received 
in their day as articles of belief, and to which often 
the very truth of God was pledged, but which are 
now not only disbelieved, but almost forgotten. 

To give a few instances, which will at the same 
time help to substantiate my charge that Christians 
have been as foolish about the Bible as Mohammed- 
ans about the Koran. In the sixteenth century it 
was positively maintained that the vowel-points^ in 
the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired because God 
could not have left the correct reading of any word 
in the least degree uncertain. When, after a time, 
this was questioned, and some scholars ventured to 
assert that these vowel-points were not invented for 
a thousand years after the Old Testament was com- 
pleted, they were at once charged with being " unsound 
on inspiration." Well, we all know now that these 
scholars were right, and at present this old dispute is 
almost forgotten, and inspiration remains just where 
it was. 

Then men laid down that because God was the 
author of the Bible, it must have been written in 
faultless language and style (exactly the Moham- 
medan assumption about the Koran). How could 
God^s own Word be in inferior Hebrew or Greek ? To 
' See the author's Old Documents and New Bible, p. 14. 



60 HOW TO FORM 

say such a thing would be to discredit His authorship 
of it. But this too was found to be a mistake. The 
Bible was not written in faultless language and style, 
and men gradually learned that this was not neces- 
sarily involved in inspiration. 

Again, so strongly was it believed that the Word 
of God must have been miraculously preserved from 
the slightest error of copyists, through all the ages, 
that quite lately, when the Revised Version dis- 
closed the many little slips that had taken place 
in the copying of manuscripts, it seriously disturbed 
people's faith in the Scriptures. In fact, it was public- 
ly asserted in the Convention of the American Episco- 
pal Church that " not all the assaults of scepticism 
have so shaken the ancient reverence for the Script- 
ures in the minds of Christians at large ! " Why ? 
Just because men had calmly assumed that God ought 
to have miraculously guarded the fingers of copyists 
from making the slightest mistake. God did not 
tell them He had done so. They had no warrant 
for thinking He had. But they assumed, and made 
it part of their belief in inspiration, that He must 
have done so, and therefore their belief in inspira- 
tion itself was shaken when their false belief was 
overthrown. 

I need not go on to speak of other such beliefs 
that have already passed or are now passing away. 
As, for example, that all the Psalms were written by 



TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 61 

David ; that Creation was finished in six days of 
twenty-four hours each ; that to deny that the sun 
went round the earth would be to deny the divinity 
of Christ, who said "Hemaketh the sun to rise," etc. 
Enough has been said to show how misleading and 
even dangerous to the faith of simple men is this 
habit of making unwarranted assumptions and bind- 
ing them up with the belief in inspiration itself, so 
that when the one is overthrown in the minds of 
men the other seems shaken to its very foundations. 

We can afford now to smile at such beliefs, but 
they were very real to the people who held them. 
And perhaps some of us who smile at them are not 
so very much wiser after all. What of our own 
popular beliefs about the Bible ? Without entering 
just now into the question as to their truth or false- 
hood, is it not clear to any one who thinks about it 
that some of the popular beliefs about inspiration 
that are most tenaciously held by the majority of 
Christians to-day are just as unwarranted assump- 
tions as those which have been long since exploded? 
Our grounds for them are just the same as those of 
our ancestors for theirs — that God must have made 
the Bible so-and-so ; that it stands to reason He 
would have done so, etc. And yet if any one of 
these beliefs of ours gets disturbed, we are just as 
frightened as were our ancestors when their beliefs 
were overthrown ; just as ready to say, "If this be 



62 HOW TO FORM 

not true, then the Bible is not inspired." What 
wonder that the assailants of the Bible should take 
us at our word ? 

Who told us that God must inspire the Bible in 
our way, not in His own? Who are we, to judge 
of the extent of knowledge and the degree of as- 
sistance that He must have given to the inspired 
writers? When are we going to profit by the 
lessons of the pas.t, and give up confidently assum- 
ing that because in our opinion God must have done 
so-and-so, therefore He has certainly done so, or if 
He has not we must refuse to believe in inspiration ? 
Wisely, but with little result, Bishop Butler told 
men a hundred and fifty years ago : " We are in no 
sense judges beforehand by what methods and in 
what proportion it were to be expected that this 
supernatural light and instruction sh^nld be afforded 
us. The only question concerning the authority of 
Scripture is whether it be what it claims to be, not 
whether it be a book of such sort and so promulged 
as weak men are apt to fancy a book contain- 
ing a Divine revelation should be. And therefore 
neither obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy of style, 
nor various readings, nor early disputes about the 
authors, nor any other things of the like kind, 
though they had been much more considerable than 
they are, could overthrow the authority of Scripture, 
unless the prophets, apostles, or our Lord had prom- 



TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 63 

ised that the hook containing the Divine revelation 
should he secure from such things,^"* * 



11. 



The Right Way. 



Well, if this be the wrong way, then what is the 
right way to learn the truth about inspiration? 
The right way is to question the Bihle itself — to 
accept finally no popular beliefs or strongly main- 
tained assumptions until you have "searched the 
Scriptures whether these things are so." 

In other branches of knowledge philosophers 
have long since recognized that this is the only true 
method of investigation. Men used to study Nature 
as they now study the Bible, by assuming certain 
propositions as true and deducing the conclusions 
that followed from them. Astronomers, for exam- 
ple, assumed that the heavenly bodies 'must move in 
circles, because their motion must be perfect, and 
the circle is the most perfect curve. All the ob- 
served facts had to be explained somehow so as to fit 
in with this assumption, and the result was puzzle and 
confusion and want of progress in learning, just as 
in the case of the Bible to-day. But Francis Bacon 
three hundred years since taught them a wiser 

* Analogy^ Part II. chap. iii. 



64 ROW TO FORM 

plan. " Question Nature herself," said he, " and she 
will answer you truly. Clear your mind of precon- 
ceived notions, examine the facts and appearances 
of Nature, and see what theory you can form to 
include them all." And thus he revolutionized the 
study of Nature so that it became fruitful of abid- 
ing results. 

This " inductive " method, as it is called, is what 
we must adopt in studying inspiration. We must 
give up the old method of assuming that certain 
things 7nust he true about the Bible, and arguing 
then from these ungrounded assumptions. We must 
follow the Baconian rule, " Question the Bible itself 
and it will answer you truly." Our theory of in- 
spiration must be learned from the facts presented 
by the Bible, and in order to be correct it must be 
consistent with all these facts. 

Let me illustrate this method by a simple example. 
I want to find out what I can about inspiration. 
God has nowhere revealed to me exactly what it is. 
He has told me that it is a Divine influence, an 
inbreathing of the Holy Ghost on the spirit of the 
ancient writers. But I cannot tell how much that 
means or what effects I should expect from it. I 
have, therefore, no way of finding out except by ex- 
amining the phenomena presented by the Bible itself. 

I think I discover that the Book differs from 
other books in being full of God. God-like 



TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 65 

thoughts flow forth from its prophets and psalm- 
ists. Its predictions tell of mysteries that only 
God could have revealed. Its history differs from 
other histories in having always a " Godward as- 
pect." It discovers God under and behind all the 
phenomena of life. While other histories merely 
tell of wars and defeats, of successes and failures, 
of kings and deliverers in a nation, this Bible history, 
with a mysterious Divine insight, pierces behind 
the veil and shows an overruling guidance ordering 
these seemingly chance occurrences. It sees God. 
It reveals God. I seem to learn then that this God- 
like teacliing, this* Divine insight, is to be made the 
chief part of my idea of inspiration. 

Then, as my study continues, there seems borne in 
on me the conviction that the Book has a mys- 
terious power of rousing men to grander, nobler 
lives ; that the study of it tends powerfully to 
deepen the sense of sin and arouse the desire of 
righteousness ; and so this wonderful spiritual 
power comes to be included in my gradually de- 
veloping idea of what inspiration implies. 

As I go on I find the prophets and others assert- 
ing clearly their consciousness of being directed, 
moved, borne along, by the influence of the Holy 
Spirit, and I am inclined to add to my notion of 
inspiration this consciousness on the writer's part of 
being God's inspired messenger. But further study 



66 S:OW TO FORM 

teaches me that other writers, as the evangelists, 
seem to show no such consciousness at all. St. Luke 
only mentions as his reason for writing, that he had 
a more perfect acquaintance with what he tells of ; 
and St. John's claim is, that he was an eye-witness 
of the events. Therefore I suspend my decision, or 
I say, "No ; this consciousness on the writer's part 
must not be made an essential part of inspiration ; 
it may perhaps be possible for a man to be specially 
inspired by God without his knowing it." 

I may then perhaps think myself warranted in 
assuming that this direction by the Holy Spirit 
involves absolute immunity from the slightest error 
in history or science of any kind. Therefore I make 
my idea of inspiration include this. It is no harm 
to make such a probable assumption so long as I 
am determined to test, and, if necessary, correct, it 
by the facts. Some day an objector points out an 
inaccurate remark about some scientific matter, or 
what seems a discrepancy, say, between the histories 
of Kings and Chronicles. If I cannot explain this 
satisfactorily, I begin to suspect that I am proceed- 
ing too fast, and that I am not warranted yet in in- 
cluding in my idea of inspiration absolute infalli- 
bility of the writers in every department. 

And thus, step by step, now arriving at some new 
notion to include in my idea of inspiration, now 
modifying or perhaps rejecting it as fuller knowl- 



TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 67 

edge comes to me, I gradually reach by a right 
scientific method the true meaning of the inspira- 
tion of the Bible. 

See what an immense relief it is to proceed in 
this way. When I start with the popular assump- 
tions that inspiration must include this, that, and the 
other idea, I am kept continually disturbed whenever 
an objector points out how the Bible fails to satisfy 
these requirements. If I base my theories only on a 
strict examination of the Bible itself, the objector 
becomes at once only my helper towards the truth. 
I am not in the least afraid of investigating his facts. 
If he triumphantly points me out a historical dis- 
crepancy or an unscientific statement, it brings no 
fright or disturbance to me. I say, if he is right 
about that, I must have been wrong in forming my 
idea of inspiration. I thought it included absolute 
immunity from error. God did not declare that it 
was so, but I thought it was. I find I was wrong. 
I must correct my theory. 

And thus, with restful heart, I am ready to face 
candidly questions that are torturing other men, 
because I think it best humbly and reverently to 
examine the phenomena presented by the Bible in 
order to find out what God has done in inspiration, 
rather than confidently to assume that because, in 
men's opinion, God must have done so-and-so, there- 
fore He has certainly done so. 



68 TRUE NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

This is the true way of learning about inspiration. 
There is no other way of keeping myself clear from 
disquiet ; no other way of forming a belief in inspi- 
ration that will not be in constant danger of being 
shattered by the logic of facts. 



CHAPTER V. 

HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

In order to show that these popular notions about 
the Bible are but mere matters of opinion on which 
good men in all ages have differed, it may be well 
here to examine very briefly what has been promi- 
nently held and taught in the past as to the nature 
and extent of Biblical inspiration. The reader will 
notice that the fact itself of inspiration is always 
unquestioned. He who denied it would be regarded 
as " an infidel." ^ The only difference of opinion is 
as to what is implied in the fact of a book being 
inspired ; whether, for example, it meant verbal 
inspiration ; whether it excluded a human element ; 
whether it secured immunity from mistakes ; whether 
it made every precept absolutely perfect and appli- 
cable to all time, etc., etc. 

^ E, g., " For either they do not believe the Divine Scriptures 
to be spoken by the Holy Ghost, and then they are nothing but 
inMels." -Fusebius, H. E., v. 28. 



70 HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIBATION, 

I. 
The Jews. 

We begin with the belief of the Jews in the 
days of our Lord and in the early centuries of 
Christianity. There can be no hesitation in assert- 
ing that they held the very highest and most rigid 
theory of verbal inspiration. The living voice of 
the prophets had ceased, and a formal literalism, 
the frequent accompaniment of a decaying religion, 
was supreme in all the study of the Bible. The 
famous Philo Judaeus, in the first century, follow- 
ing very much the Greek notions, speaks of inspira- 
tion as a kind of ecstasy. The prophet, he says, 
does not speak any words of his own, he is only 
the instrument of God, who inspires and speaks 
through him. But he says there are degrees of 
being inspired ; that all have not the same depth of 
inspiration. More rigid still were the later Jews in 
the early Christian centuries. In their eyes every 
word, every letter, every unusually formed character, 
was Divinely intended, and could not be other than 
it was without error. Their belief is well indicated 
in the tradition that when Moses ascended the 
mountain he found Jehovah making the ornamental 
letters in the book of the Law ! They were most 
scrupulous in recording every little peculiarity of 
writing, every correction or variety of reading; they 



HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 71 

counted every verse, every word, every letter ; they 
recorded how many times each separate letter of 
the alphabet occurs, and invented memorial signs 
to remember them by; they told how often the 
same word occurs at the beginning, middle, or end 
of a verse ; they gave the middle verse, the middle 
word, the middle letter, of each book of the Penta- 
teuch; they would not dare to alter in the text 
even an evident mistake, but had an intricate method 
of indicating it in the margin/ " My son,'^ said 
Rabbi Ishmael, " take great heed how thou doest 
thy work — for thy work is the work of Heaven — lest 
thou drop or add a letter of the manuscript, and so 
become a destroyer of the world." 

Such facts indicate clearly their beliefs that the 
Bible was verbally inspired in every jot and tittle; 
that, of course, it was absolutely infallible in every 
department; that every precept of the Law was of 
the highest perfection, and could never be super- 
seded. Nay, so far did their belief go, that even 
the oral commentary on the Law became regarded 
as infallible, and was asserted to have been given 
by God to Moses when He gave him the written 
Law. For it could not be thought that a perfect 
Law could have an imperfect commentary, or one of 
less authority than that of Jehovah Himself. 

There is no question but that these extravagant 
^ See the author's Old Documents and New Bihie, p. 91, etc. 



^2 HISTORT OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

notions were providentially used for the preservation 
of the Old Testament text. Men with such beliefs 
were marvellously fitted for the task of transmitting 
the Sacred Writings for centuries without mistake. 
But they were fitted for nothing higher. I do not 
say that many an honest heart was not nurtured in 
true religion on these beliefs. But such slavery to 
the letter of Scripture made men in a great measure 
incapable of winning for themselves the deep knowl- 
edge of its spirit. They were the petty formalists 
of New Testament days whose Bible teaching was 
so sternly censured by Christ ; the men who, in bigot 
zeal for the Word of God, could persecute to the 
death the Son of God Himself. 

It is curious to find that, with these notions, they 
nevertheless seemed to believe in different grades 
of inspiration : the Law stood far and away the 
highest of all ; the Prophets came next in rank ; 
and lower still, the Psalms and other writings. One 
cannot easily see how they made this consistent with 
their belief in a mechanical verbal inspiration. 

II. 

The Early Church. 

As the reader will expect from what has been 
said of the growth of the New Testament, we are 
not likely to find any very definite theories about 



BISTORT OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 73 

inspiration laid down in the earlier days of the 
Church. We find everywhere the full acceptance 
of the Old Testament, the solemn reverence for the 
words of the Lord and His apostles, and the belief 
in their Divine inspiration and their deep signifi- 
cance, but no attempt to formulate any theory as to 
what is implied in the fact of inspiration. Doubtless 
the influence of the Lord^s example and that of 
His apostles would keep them from that rigid theo- 
rizing and " worship of the letter " which was so 
prominent in the case of the Jews. They must have 
seen that Christ, with all His deep reverence for 
Scripture, treated it with considerable freedom — nay, 
even superseded some of the Old Testament by de- 
veloping it into higher teaching of His own. They 
must have seen how St. Paul regarded the Law as 
imperfect ; how freely the apostles quoted the in- 
spired writers, not at all binding themselves to 
the very words, but satisfied if they reproduced 
the spirit of its meaning. Even giving the fullest 
prominence to the few instances that seem to mili- 
tate against the assertion, such as Paul's arguing 
about the seed and the seeds in Gal. iii. 16, I have 
no hesitation in saying that a theory like the modern 
one of verbal inspiration could never have been 
learned from the Lord and the apostles, and there- 
fore is not likel}^ to have existed in the early Chris- 
tian Church. It seems to me that the history of 



74 BISTORT OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

the gradual formation of the Canon is a clear proof 
that it did not exist. Men were content to go on 
for centuries without definitely deciding as to the 
limits of the New Testament. They never made it 
a matter of vital importance. They were satisfied 
to differ about the few disputed books, and to 
quote them with a lesser degree of confidence, feel- 
ing that there was much of God and good in them, 
though perhaps they had not come to them with the 
same high authority as other books. If they had 
held the modern notions of verbal inspiration, 
such a state of things would have utterly distracted 
them. 

When we come to examine their writings, it is 
easy to quote passages on one side or the other. 
To give some examples from the more prominent 
writers. Clement of Rome (a.d. 90) calls the Scrip- 
tures the " true words of the Holy Ghost.^" Justin 
Martyr (a.d. 150) says the action of the Holy Spirit 
on the inspired writers is as that of "the plec- 
trum striking the lyre.^' Athenagoras (a.d. 170) 
says it is " as a flute-player might blow a flute. ^^ 
This certainly looks like a high theory of verbal 
inspiration, and almost a denying altogether of the 
human element in Scripture ; but, as has been well 
remarked by the Bishop of Durham, we must remem- 
ber in such illustrations, which seem to make the 
writer but the j^assive instrument under the hand of 



HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION 75 

God, that the tone and quality of the note depends as 
well on the instrument as on the hand which plays it. 

The great Clement of Alexandria (a.d. 190) seems 
to have held a very high theory of verbal inspiration 
and complete infallibility of Scripture. Tertullian 
(a.d. 200) thought that the Divine communication 
was made to the writers in a sort of trance or ecstasy ; 
though he thinks, too, that the apostles sometimes 
spoke their own words, as where St. Paul says, " To 
the rest speak I, not the Lord.^' St. Augustine (a.d. 
400) speaks of the Gospels as dictated by the Head of 
the Church, and generally asserts the infallible accu- 
racy of every word of Scripture ; though he often 
expresses opinions inconsistent with this. Eusebius 
(a.d. 325) is indignant that one should assert the 
possibility of the Psalmist making a mistake in a 
name ; and another father, Epiphanius, protests 
against the opinion that the Apostle in a particular 
passage spoke as a man. 

But, on the other hand, we find just as great men, 
nay, even the same men, on other occasions freely 
questioning statements of Scripture. Origen, for 
example (a.d. 220), the greatest student of Biblical 
criticism in the Church of his day, though no man 
could speak more reverently about the inspiration 
of Scripture, yet bids men neglect the letter, which 
may be useless, and even calculated to offend, and 
seek the spirit of the teaching, which is always help- 



76 HI8T0UT OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

ful ; he asserts the existence of discrepancies enough 
in the Gospels " to make one dizzy/" and criticises 
certain precepts of the Law as unreasonable, though 
he beautifully points to its Divinely ordained pur- 
pose — " When the people murmured in the wilder- 
ness, Moses led them to the rock to drink ; and even 
now he leadeth them to Christ." St. Jerome (a.d. 
380) is most inconsistent in his views. At one time 
he seems to hold absolute verbal inspiration, at 
another he speaks of the hopeless errors of chronol- 
ogy ; he thinks that St. Mark in ii. 26 wrote Abia- 
thar in mistake for Abimelech ; he criticises St. Paul 
with the greatest freedom, speaks of his barbarisms 
and provincialisms, and his weak, inefficient argu- 
ments, especially that of the "seed"' and *^ seeds" 
in Gal. iii. 16. But it is important to notice that 
he never dreams of treating these matters as incon- 
sistent with inspiration. St. Chrysostom (a.d. 380) 
sees variations in the different Gospel narratives, 
though he thinks it most natural, and a proof that 
the evangelists were independent witnesses. 

It is interesting to see how clearly the higher 
spirits of this period recognized that gradual 
development of Revelation, the non-recognition of 
which so often disturbs people in their Bible- 
reading to-day. They see that many of the Old 
Testament precepts are but in concession to a lower 
moral state. God dealt " after the manner of a 



HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. -77 

schoolmaster or physician, and while curtailing 
some parts of their ancestral customs, tolerated the 
rest, making some concession to their tastes ; . . . 
for men do not easily abandon what long cus- 
tom has consecrated." "Do not ask," says St. 
Chrysostom, " how these Old Testament precepts 
can be good now, when the need for them is past ; 
ask how they were good when the period required 
them. Their highest praise is, that we now see 
them to be defective ; for if they had not trained us 
well, so that we became susceptible of higher things, 
we should not have now seen their deficiency." 
And, again, St. Basil : " The Law, being a shadow 
of good things to come, and the typical teaching of 
the prophets, which is the truth darkly, have been 
devised as exercises for the eyes of the heart, that 
we may pass from these to wisdom hidden in 
mystery.^' ^ 

In estimating the notions of Biblical inspiration 
at this time it is important also to notice the strong 
belief in the inspiration of the whole body of the' 
Church as being something that was inferior only 
in degree to that of the writers of Holy Scripture. 

But enough has been said already to show that 
the early fathers, while unanimous in their con- 
viction that all Scripture is given by inspiration 
of God, exercised a considerable freedom of belief 
as to the nature and limits of that inspiration. 
' Quoted in Lux Mundi, p. 330. 



7 8 HISTOB Y OF NO TIONS OF IN8PIIIA TlOm 

III. 
The Middle Ages. 

In the Middle Ages the general current of belief 
on this subject was not, in theory, very different 
from that of the early Church. The inspiration 
of the Bible was firmly held, but we must remember 
that this inspiration of the Bible was only on a 
level with that of the traditions of the Church. 
This position was stereotyped in the decrees of 
the Council of Trent, by which the Roman Catholic 
Church still declares that she venerates with equal 
piety and reverence the books of the Bible 
and the unwritten traditions preserved in the 
Church by a continuous succession. Remembering 
the hazy and contradictory nature of these tradi- 
tions, it must be evident how this position tended 
to lower views of the inspiration of Scripture. In 
fact, one frequently finds the fathers quoted almost 
as authoritatively as the inspired writers. 

And, besides this, there was also a growing 
tendency to mysticism, which dwelt so strongly on 
the communion of the individual spirit with God 
as almost to raise it to the rank of an inspiration 
of the individual. An illustration of the best class 
of this mysticism is found in Quakerism to-day. 
The reader will easily see that such exaggerated 
belief in the inspiration of the individual and the 



HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 79" 

communications received from tbe Spirit of God 
would go far to break down the boundary between 
tbe special inspiration of the Bible and the ordinary 
inspiration of Christian men, from which " all good 
counsels and all just works do proceed/^ 

It is not easy, however, to gather the main drift 
of opinion in the Middle Ages as to the questions 
that are most occupying men's minds to-day. The 
infallibility of the Bible science and history, for 
example, was no doubt firmly believed, even though 
we have the very free speculations of Abelard 
in the twelfth century that the apostles were 
liable to error, and that the prophets sometimes 
spoke their own merely human thoughts. But, in 
truth, such questions seldom came practically before 
men, because it does not seem to have occurred to 
them that the Bible was to be read in a natural 
manner as the history of God^s dealings with 
humanity, and that its words were to be under- 
stood, like those of any other book, in their plain, 
natural sense. 

An unnatural exegesis grew as a great fungus 
on the Scriptures. Like the Jewish traditions 
which our Lord condemned, the corrupted Church 
traditions and the vast dogmatic systems of the 
scholastic theologians overwhelmed the free spirit- 
ual teaching of the Word of God. It was regarded 
but as a sort of quarry for proof-texts of the 



80 BISTORT OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

great doctrines of divine philosophy, and any diffi- 
culties such as the plain reader might iind were 
easily explained away by an arbitrary system of 
interpretation. 

One of the noblest aims of the men of the 
Reformation was to restore the Bible to its true 
position, and to teach men that it simply meant 
what it said. Unfortunately, however, the leaven 
of the old teaching soon passed into the later 
Reformation schools, and in a great degree frus- 
trated this high purpose of the leaders. 

IV. 

The Reformation. 

At the Reformation came a great change in the 
position of the Bible. The " infallible Church " 
had been tried and found grievously wanting, and 
men in fierce revolt against its abuses and supersti- 
tions felt the need of an " infallible Bible " to supply 
its place as a guide. " The Bible the religion of 
Protestants," "The Scriptures alone sufficient for 
salvation,^' became the watchwords of the move- 
ment, and the inevitable tendency was to a very 
high theory of the nature and extent of their 
inspiration. 

But this tendency only ran to excess in the 
next generation. With the men who had boldly 



ElSrOB Y OF NOTIONS OF 1N8PIBA TION. 8 1 

broken with the greatest authority on earth, the 
danger at first was rather of being over-bold with 
all authority. Freedom of thought, boldness of 
inquiry, was their great power in dealing with a 
corrupt Church, and they naturally carried it into 
other provinces as well. However we may regret 
opinions which, doubtless, they themselves regretted 
in later life, we must not judge their impetuosity 
too sharply at such a crisis. In a life-and-death 
struggle for liberty of thought it was almost inevi- 
table that the liberty should at times degenerate 
into license. 

Erasmus held very free views about inspiration 
and the Canon of Scripture. He refused to believe 
that the Revelation of St. John is inspired, and 
thought that, though it may be a blessed thing to 
believe what is in it, nobody is able to tell what 
that is. He did not believe in the absolute infalli- 
bility of any Scripture writer. Christ alone, he said, 
is called the Truth. He alone was free from all error. 

Luther dared to judge the books of the Bible 
by his own intuition, and to call that of St. James 
an " epistle of straw " because it seemed to clash 
with his views of Justification by Faith. In the 
contents of Scripture, with the " gold, silver, and 
precious stones," he finds also "wood, hay, and 
stubble.'' "Whatever does not proclaim Christ,^' 
he says, "is not apostolic, though written by St. 
6 



82 HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 

Peter or St. Paul. Whatever does proclaim Christ 
is apostolic, though written by Judas, or Annas, or 
Pilate, or Herod /^ 

He regards the Book of Job as a historical drama 
to teach resignation, and thinks that the different 
writings of Scripture are not all of the same 
value. Those of St. Paul he holds highest of all, 
though he does not shrink from criticising some of 
his arguments. He gives no countenance to the 
notion of verbal inspiration, and repeatedly empha- 
sizes the great truth so often forgotten in contro- 
versies about the Bible, that the Holy Spirit is not 
confined to a book of the past ages, but dwells and 
speaks in the conscience of every Christian man. 

Calvin was a poorer character than Luther, and 
his views of inspiration were correspondingly infe- 
rior. He gave conscience but little prominence in 
interpreting Scripture, as witness the repulsive 
tenets of his system. He accepted the morality of 
the Old Testament as a sufficient rule for Christian 
men. He thought all parts of the Bible on a level. 
When Renee, Duchess of Ferrara, daughter of Louis 
Xn., remarked that David's example in hating his 
enemies is not applicable to us, Calvin sternly told 
her that such a gloss would upset all Scripture, that 
even in his hatred David is an example to us and a 
type of Christ.* Perhaps such notions as this ac- 
' Farrar, Hist, of Interpretation, p. 350. 



HISTOR Y OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 83 

count for the burning of Servetus for his beliefs. 
The men of the Inquisition so justified their acts; 
why not Calvin ? 

In the next generation, when the wild excite- 
ment had calmed down and the free spiritual thought 
had partly died away, the Bible passed quickly into 
the position that was so natural for it under the 
circumstances. As in the case of the Jews of old, 
after the heroes and prophets came the formalist 
scribes and doctors of the Law ; after the warm, fresh 
wave of inspiration came the cold, petrified worship 
of the letter. "When the first act of the Refor- 
mation was closed and the great men passed away 
whose presence seemed to supply the strength which 
was found before in the recognition of the one living 
Body of Christ, their followers invested the Bible as 
a whole with all the attributes of mechanical infal- 
libility which the Romanists had claimed for the 
Church. Pressed by the necessities of their position, 
the disciples of Calvin were contented to maintain 
the direct and supernatural action of a guiding 
Power on the very words of the inspired writer, 
without any regard to his personal or rational posi- 
tion. Every part of Scripture was held to be not 
only pregnant with instruction, but with instruction 
of the same kind and in the same sense." ^ 

The exigencies of controversy drove them to fatal 
^ Westcott's 'Introd. to Study of Gospels, p. 5. 



1 



8 4 HISTOR Y OF NO TI0N8 OF INSPIRA TION. 

extremes. Against the infallibility of the Church they 
set up the infallibility of the Bible. The Divine 
factor in inspiration is so emphasized as completely 
to ignore the human. The writer is but a pen in the 
hand of God, an amanuensis of the Hol}^ Spirit. 
The Scriptures throughout are verbally inspired, so 
that every word and syllable and letter is such as it 
would have been if the Almighty had written it with 
His own hand. Every word of them is the word of 
God. " Whatever is related by the Holy Spirit is 
absolutely true whether it pertain to doctrine, morals, 
history, chronology, topography, or nomenclature." 
And it is rigorously deduced from all this that in 
the transmission through all the ages the scribes 
and copyists were miraculously guarded from error 
or corruption, since otherwise how could we be sure 
of an infallible Bible ? ' 

What a parallel to the formal literalism of the 
Jews when the life was passing out of their Church ! 
And the parallel becomes more perfect as we find that, 
as with the Jews, so here also all this so-called rever- 
ence for the letter of the Scripture was at a time 
of a low ebb of real spiritual religion. Never was 
there more bitterness and bigotry and narrowness of 
creed in the whole history of Protestantism than in 
that period after the Reformation when such theories 
became petrified into articles of popular belief. 
* A Protestant Synod in Geneva in 1675 formally asserted this. 



HISTORY OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRATION. 85 

Thus, in the rigid scholasticism of the Post- 
Reformation days arose those false theories about 
inspiration which men of our day have learned to 
identify with inspiration itself, and which, in the 
inevitable recoil from their extravagances, are re- 
sponsible for so much of our rationalism and doubt 
and disquiet. 

V. 
In Modern Days. 

The widespread Deism and infidelity of the eight- 
eenth century was, in some measure at least, a recoil 
from this extreme dogmatism of Post-Reformation 
daj's. The extravagant over-statements about the 
Bible soon caused a rebound to the opposite extreme. 
" The devil's last method," says Richard Baxter, " is 
to undo by overdoing, and so to destroy the author- 
ity of the Bible by over-magnifying it." Sceptical 
attacks fastened on every little inaccuracy or dis- 
crepancy that could be detected, and especially upon 
the moral difficulties to be found in the Old Testa- 
ment. Such matters should puzzle no one who 
judged rightly about the Bible, but they were very 
dangerous weapons in those days of extravagant 
claims on its behalf. If the Book was " a collection 
of supernatural syllables," directly dictated by the 
Spirit of God, if the slightest imperfection in histor- 
ical or scientific statement, or in moral and spiritual 



86 HISTOR T OF NOTIONS OF INSPIRA TION 

teaching, was, as held by theologians, inconsistent 
with inspiration, the task of the infidel was no diflS- 
cult one. 

The more thoughtful Christians saw that such 
teaching must be corrected. Yet for generations 
very little was done. Perhaps the first really effec- 
tive attempt was that of Coleridge in his Confes- 
sions of an Inquiring Spirit, a book which was not 
published until after his death. It is the work of 
a man who really loved his Bible, and whose whole 
soul was roused within him at the mischief done by 
the mechanical notions about it which prevailed in 
his day. He insists on the authority of conscience 
in interpreting it. He points out the naturalness and 
fitness of the human element in it. He passionately 
declaims against the notion that the Bible must be 
infallible in every jot and tittle in order to show 
itself inspired of God. So rapt is he in admiration 
of the nobleness and grandeur of its teaching that 
it is almost with scorn he refers to the laboured ex- 
planations of its few petty discrepancies and diffi- 
culties. " Perhaps they can be explained,^' he says, 
" perhaps they cannot ; who cares a straw whether 
they can or no ? '' 

It is true his notions tended towards a dangerous 
extreme. That was only natural under the circum- 
stances. But he certainly roused many to think seri- 
ously about tlie subject, and among them were those 



HISTOB Y OF NOTIONS OF INSPIBA TION 8 7 

worthy to follow in his steps. Kingsley and Maurice 
and Arnold, and others of their kind, carried on 
the contest, not always perhaps in the wisest and 
safest way, not always keeping from extreme posi- 
tions, yet on the whole helping men towards broader, 
truer views about the Bible. And we are profiting 
by their work to-day. " Other men have laboured, 
and we are entered into their labours." 



Book 5$. 



$ou) (Soil inspirci tl)c 33ible. 



INTEODUCTIOK 
I. 

Up to this we have been trying to clear the 
ground, to help the reader into a position from which 
he may with restful heart examine the question of 
Inspiration for himself. We have found that the 
chief cause of the present disquiet lies less in the 
Bible itself than in the unwarranted assumptions 
of men with regard to it. We have learned that not 
by a priori assumptions, but by a scientific induc- 
tive method of inquiry, can men find the truth 
about inspiration. And in a brief historical exam- 
ination we have seen what has been believed in 
different ages as to its mode and extent. 

I^ow, with the foundation thus laid, we proceed 
to inquire what we are really warranted in be- 
lieving on the subject. 

The question before us is this : — 

How DID God inspire the Bible ? What is 

IMPLIED IN TPIE fact OF ITS INSPIRATION ? AD- 
MITTING THAT THE WRITERS OF HoLT SCRIPTURE 
WERE INSPIRED, WHAT DOES THAT BIND US TO BE- 
LIEVE CONCERNING THEIR WRITINGS ? 



92 INTRODUCTION. 

II. 

For example — Did God inspire the Bible so as 
to exclude altogether the human element ? Was 
the writer merely the pen of the Holy Spirit? 
Can no idiosyncrasy of the man who wrote, no 
human passion or emotion or prejudice, be admitted 
as existing in the " Word of* God " ? 

Did God inspire the Bible so as to make the 
slightest error impossible in history or science ? 
Does my belief in inspiration necessitate the belief 
that every statement in Scripture is absolutely 
infallible, or is it consistent with the belief that 
sometimes at least such statements may only rep- 
resent the knowledge of the time ? 

Or with regard to moral and religious questions. 
If I believe that in the Bible God has given an in- 
spired revelation to lift up mankind to a higher life, 
must I therefore believe that He gave that revelation 
all at once in its full perfection, or might it possibly 
be consistent with a belief in inspiration that His 
teaching should at first have been cruder and more 
imperfect? In other words, is it wrong to think 
that there may be early moral precepts and laws in 
the Old Testament which are too low and too im- 
perfect for the guidance of Christian men to-day ? 

Once more. Did God so inspire the Bible that 
my belief in its inspiration is necessarily tied to the 



INTRODUCTION, 93 

accepted names of the authors at the head of each 
book, and to those books having remained absolutely 
unaltered since they left their original authors' 
hand? Is inspiration consistent with hard brain- 
work in searching for information from ancient 
documents, or with transferring bodily whole pas- 
sages from uninspired writings ? Must later editing 
or revising by hands unknown to us destroy our 
belief in the inspiration of a book ? 

The reader will remember how strongly I have 
insisted that no prejudices or a priori assumptions 
of the " religious world " shall be allowed to interfere 
with the answering of these questions ; that both the 
Bible and the Church have left us free to investigate 
them, and that the true method of doing so is by a 
careful and reverent but perfectly fearless examina- 
tion of the phenomena presented by the Bible itself. 

It will not be expected that I should here at- 
tempt this exhaustive examination. It would take a 
very large volume indeed to go through the books of 
the Bible, examining their evidence on even any one 
of these questions. I have only space to give a few 
instances of such examination to indicate the lines 
on which it should be carried out, and to state the 
results which are universally accepted by all who 
have a right to speak with authority on the matter. 



CHAPTER I. 

INSPIRATION. 

I. 
What is Inspiration? 

The answer was once quoted by a great English 
thinker,' referring to a similar question — 

" Si non rogas iiitelligo " — 

" If you don't ask me I know ; " 

and I think it is the answer most of us would be 
inclined to give to this question as to what we 
mean by the inspiration of the Bible. We have 
a vague notion about it as being some special 
mysterious influence from God on the Sacred Writ- 
ings, a notion that does well enough for practical 
purposes, but is very hard to express when we are 
asked for a definition. And I doubt if we can lay 
down any exact definition of it. If a man believes 
in the actual dictation of the words of Scripture by 
God, believes that God was the author of Scripture 
in the same sense as Bunyan was the author of 
" The Pilgrim's Progress," then his idea of inspiration 
* Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, 



INSPIRATION, 95 

is perfectly clear. But if such a theory as that be 
surrendered, the possibility of sharp, clear-cut defini- 
tion must be surrendered with it. 

The idea of inspiration is by no means exclusively 
Jewish or Christian. The classical authors fre- 
quently speak of the "divine frenzy " or " afflatus," of 
"being borne along by God," being "God-inspired," 
etc. Artistic powers and poetic talents, gifts of 
prediction, the warmth of love and the battle frenzy, 
were all ascribed to the power of the god possess- 
ing the man inspired. These ideas and words after- 
wards passed over into Christian theological language, 
and necessarily influenced in some degree the con- 
ception of inspiration in the early Church. 

The word " inspiration " only occurs twice in 
the Bible — in Job xxxii. 8 and 2 Tim. iii. 16 — 
but the word does not help us much to the con- 
tents of the idea. " Inspired " simply means in- 
breathed-by-God, which expression may be applied 
to any degree of Divine influence. In 2 Peter i. 
21, the inspiration of "holy men of old^^ is 
described as a being "moved ^^ or "borne along" 
by the Holy Ghost, which seems a stronger ex- 
pression than "inbreathed." But neither will 
help us further than this, that " inspiration " means 
Divine influence. 

How, then, shall we define inspiration after 
carefully examining the facts of the Bible ? We 



96 INSPIRATION. 

must entirely decline to go further than the bare 
definition given in the word itself : A Divine in- 
breathing, A Divine influence. For this is the 
only definition that will cover all the phenomena 
and no more. This Divine influence, it would seem 
from an examination of the Bible, might sometimes 
be a very ordinary matter indeed, merely helping a 
man to tell more reverently and correctly than he 
would otherwise do some matter that he had learned 
by his own observation. It might sometimes too 
be a power full of marvel and mystery, enabling men 
to understand the secret things that " belong to the 
Lord our God." It helped one man to be a historian, 
another to be an editor of old documents, another to 
be an architect and designer, another to sing noble 
soul-stirring hymns. It helped an apostle to write 
letters of wise counsel for the Church, and touched 
a prophet's " hallowed lips with fire " to rouse a 
nation from its evil life. 

Though mainly a moral and spiritual endowment, 
it seems also to have elevated and enlightened the 
mind. Its manifestations were manifold and differed 
in different men. It gave a deep insight into moral 
and spiritual truth, a perception of God, an eleva- 
tion of soul, an enthusiasm for righteousness, a glow- 
ing warmth of devotion. It gave too a spirit of 
wisdom and judgment, a quickening and enlarging 
of the mental faculties. It gave all these, or some 



INSPIRATION. 97 

of them. It gave them in various proportion, mani- 
festing itself differently in different cases. 

We must not, then, think of inspiration as a some- 
thing always uniform in its action, or always pro- 
ducing some startlingly miraculous result. It seems 
to be best described by the simple statement that it 
is God^s endowing of the writers, each as was needed 
for the work before him. 



II. 
Revelation and Inspiration. 

It is very important for preventing confusion of 
thought on this subject to lay down clearly the dis- 
tinction between Inspiration and Revelation. You 
inspire a life, you reveal a fact. ^* Inspiration is a 
breath which fills the sails of the inner being. Reve- 
lation is as a telescope, bringing into range objects 
which the eye could not discern." Revelation 
means the disclosing of something unknown before. 
Inspiration means the inbreathing of the Holy Ghost 
to produce a more spiritual attitude — a more burn- 
ing zeal, a deeper love, a keener insight into God's 
purposes, or whatever other qualities were most 
needed for accomplishing the work for which the 
inspired writer was raised up. 

Inspiration, then, may exist without Revelation. 
Thus, for example, if criticism should prove that 



^ 



98 inspiration: 

no single item in a book was supernaturally revealed, 
that the facts were all learned in the ordinary way 
from observation, or from old documents, or from 
the testimony of others, this would not in the least 
prevent its being an inspired book ; it would not in 
the least disprove the statement that the writer was 
inspired with a clearness of memory and an insight 
into the Divine signification of facts, and with more 
than natural discretion to determine what he should 
say or how he should say it. 

Most certainly all the Bible is not a Divine 
Revelation. Many things that could not be known 
by human efforts were miraculously revealed by 
God ; but many more things, of course, needed no 
such revelation. No revelation was needed to tell 
the incidents of Jewish history. The study of 
old documents and the personal observation and 
memory of the inspired historian were sufficient 
for this purpose. No revelation was necessary to 
give the names of the Apostles and Joseph and 
the Virgin Mother, or the story of the Baptist or 
the miracles of our Lord, which the writers or 
their informants had witnessed. St. Paul needed 
no Divine revelation to inform him of his own 
apostolic missionary journeys which he relates in 
his letters. 

The greater part of the Bible, then, was not 
revealed by God, and did not need to be. But we 



INSPIUATION. 99 

believe all the Bible was inspired by Him. Even 
when the writers used their own observation and 
memory, or used old historical records, such as the 
Book of Jashar, or the histories of Gad, and of Iddo 
the Seer, etc., we can see the need of inspiration, 
that the value and significance and practical bearing 
of facts should be rightly appreciated ; that things 
should be seen in their true proportion ; that a 
sufficient record should be made ; that the hand of 
God should be visible behind the outward history. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE TWO EXTREMES. 
Introductory. 

Though, as already pointed out, we cannot accu- 
rately define inspiration, or explain its nature, or 
measure the exact amount of assistance given by 
God, yet we can, by a careful examination of the 
phenomena presented, do much to clear our thoughts 
about it. We can discover whether it must make 
every statement in the Bible an unmixed utterance 
of God, or whether it is consistent with a human 
element of imperfection ; whether an inspired docu- 
ment can be fallible ; whether inspiration could at 
any period coexist with lower and cruder notions 
of religion and of God than those of the Christian 
world to-day. 

It will manifestly help us in our search if we 
can first lay down definite boundaries between which 
all inquiries must be confined, outside which we 
can confidently say the true views of inspiration 
are not to be found. 

Now, there are two extreme theories which mark 
the limits of thought on the subject for all who 



TEE TWO EXTREMES. 101 

believe in any sense in a Divine inspiration of 
Scripture. On the lower side what, for want of a 
better name, we may call Natural^ on the higher 
side what is commonly known as Yerhal^ Inspira- 
tion. If we can dispose of both these as too ex- 
treme, we thus narrow the limits within which the 
right theory of inspiration must lie, and so approach 
in some degree nearer to the truth. 



I. 

Natural Inspiration. 

In the present disturbance of old beliefs on the 
subject of inspiration, there is an easy, simple theory 
put forward, which, by reason of its easiness and 
simplicity, is gaining ground with many thinking 
people, and is uttered glibly and flippantly by many 
who are by no means thinking people, but who have 
caught it at second hand from such. The fact that 
it contains a certain amount of truth makes it, as 
in all such cases, the more subtle and dangerous. 

This theory is, that the Bible is a collection of 
documents written .in good faith by intelligent and 
trustworthy men, whose work was indeed guided 
and inspired by the Holy Ghost, but only in the 
same sense as the work of every noble writer, be 
he poet or preacher, who has helped men to truer 
thoughts of religion and of God. It considers that 



102 THE TWO EXTREMES. 

every great poet is inspired ; that every earnest 
thinker who has a message for his generation is as 
much a prophet of the Highest as if his works were 
included within the covers of the Bible. David 
and Milton, Isaiah and John Bunyan, Plato and St. 
Paul, exhibit only different manifestations of the 
Spirit of God. " The Bible writers only possessed 
in a higher degree a certain form of consciousness 
which in some degree belongs to all mankind, which 
is as wide as the world, as universal as God." The 
inspiration of the prophets who foretold the future 
was but a deeper insight into the tendencies of life 
around them. The power to rouse the consciences 
of men resulted from the holiness of the writer's 
life. As Burke foretold the French Revolution, so 
Isaiah foretold the captivity of the Jews. As the 
words of a holy man of God to-day will " find " and 
touch people to their inmost hearts, so do the words 
of the Psalmists and Apostles, because their lives 
were lived so close to God. 

I. (a) 

How Far is it True? 

No doubt there is a good deal of truth in all 
this. It would be a great mistake to think that 
inspired men existed only in the past ; that inspired 
writings existed only in the Bible ; that the Spirit 



THE TWO EXTRE3IES. 103 

of God was not inspiring the hearts of earnest 
heathen teachers of old and earnest Christian 
teachers to-day, and by their means lifting men up 
to nobler conceptions of life and duty. Who would 
condemn the assumption of the petition in the 
Liturgy that God in our own day cleanses the 
thoughts of men's hearts by the ''inspiration " of His 
Holy Spirit ? Who would deny that the messages 
of such men as Luther and Thomas a Kempis and 
Kingsley and Carlyle were inspired by God for 
the ennobling and elevating of religious thought ? 

But surely all this is not inconsistent with the 
belief that God specially trained one nation for the 
sake of the rest ; that He bestowed special and 
supernatural inspiration on certain men in earlier 
ages of the world, and by their means revealed to 
mankind those fundamental notions of Himself and of 
His will which have formed the basis for all further 
religious teaching since. Let us, therefore, see what 
reason we have for this belief in a special and super- 
natural inspiration. 

I. l^*) 
What the Writers thought of their Inspiration. 

In comparing the claim of the Scripture autliors 
with that of other writers, it is well to ask at the 
beginning, What did these several writers them- 
selves think on the matter? Their testimony 



104 THE TWO EXTREMES. 

ought surely to be worth something as to the 
secret phenomena of their own souls. And this 
question brings before us at once the important 
reply, that while our great poets and moralists and 
teachers never think of claiming a special inspira- 
tion of God, several of the Bible writers boldly do so. 
Look at the Old Testament. Hear, first, King 
David's opinion of his inspiration: — 

" The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, 
And His word was on my tongue." ^ 

Hear the word of Isaiah : — 

"For the Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand, 
and instructed me." ^ 

Hear Jeremiah^s account of his commission : — 

"Now the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, 
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ; and 
before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified 
thee. I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations. 
Then said T, Ah, Lord God 1 behold, I cannot speak ; for 
I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am 
a child : for to whomsoever I send thee thou shalt go, 
and whatsoever I shall command thee thou shalt speak. 
. . . Behold, I have put my words into thy mouth. 
See, 1 have this day set thee over the nations," etc.^ 

Hear Amos, the poor herdsman, when the priest 
of Bethel attempted to silence him : — 

1 2 Sam. xxiii. 2. ^ Isa. viii. 11. ' Jer. i. 5-10. 



THE TWO EXTRE3IES. 105 

"I was no prophet," he cries, "neither a prophet's 
son, but a herdraan and gatherer of sycamore fruit ; and 
the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord 
said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel." » 

So, also, Ezekiel tells how 

" The Spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I 
went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit, and the hand 
of the Lord was strong upon me."^ 

But I need not multiply examples. Let the 
reader go through the whole of the prophetic 
writings and feel the impressiveness of that con- 
stant iteration, " The word of the Lord," " Thus 
saith the Lord." Let him see the half -reluctant 
prophet groaning under the weight of the " burden 
of the Lord " supernaturally laid on him, and 
forced at times against his will to speak when the 
Spirit of God has come on him with power, and 
he will have little doubt indeed that the ancient 
prophets believed themselves to have a special and 
supernatural inspiration. 

Then turn to the New Testament. Read those 
strong statements of our Lord referred to in an 
earlier chapter.^ See the confident assertion of 
St. Paul as to how he received his Gospel : " For 
neither did I receive it from man, nor was I 
taught it, but it came to me through revelation 
of Jesus Christ." See how authoritatively he 

* Amos vii. 14, 15. ^ Ezek. iii. 14. ' Book I. chap. ii. 



106 THE TWO EXTREMES. 

heads his writings, " Paul, an apostle of Jesus 
Christ," as if feeling that here lay his chief claim 
to be heard. Hear him assert, like the prophets 
of old, " This we say unto you by the word of the 
Lord/^ Thus he thinks of his own inspiration. 
And if you want to know what he thought of 
the Old Testament writings, see the many refer- 
ences to them in his letters, where he speaks of 
them reverently as the " oracles of God ; " where 
he tells what " God said in Hosea,^' and how 
" God said in another place, I will dwell in them, 
and walk in them ; " and especially where he 
so confidently speaks to Timothy of " all Scrip- 
ture inspired of God," which, no matter how the 
text may be translated, at least asserts his belief 
in a special and supernatural inspiration. 

And so we might go through the rest of the 
New Testament and learn from various writers their 
belief that the prophets " searched " what the Spirit 
of Christ that was in them did signify ; ^ that 
" holy men of old spake as they were moved by 
the Holy Ghost ; " ^ that " God had spoken by the 
mouth of all His holy prophets since the world 
began ; " ^ that " all this was done that it might 
be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the 
prophet.'' * But it is needless to go on multiplying 
instances to show clearly to the reader that the 
1 1 Pet. i. 11. ^ 2 Pet. i. 21. ' Acts iii. 21. * St. Matt. i. 23. 



THE TWO EXTREMES. 107 

writers of Holy Scripture were themselves at any 
rate believers in a special inspiration, a miraculous 
endowment given by God. 



I. (c) 

Other Considerations. 

There are many other objections to this theory 
of natural inspiration which it is unnecessary to 
dwell on here. There is the marvellous insight of 
these Bible authors, which so distinguishes them from 
all others ; the Divine prophecies which caused the 
widespread expectation of a Messiah ; the mirac- 
ulous knowledge, like that of St. Paul, "Behold, I 
show you a mystery : We shall not all sleep,^' etc. 
There is the wonderful way in which all these 
separate, unconnected books, with centuries between 
them, form a complete and connected Bible, as if 
some Master-mind were directing the plan. There 
are other reasons, too, referred to in my chapter* 
on the grounds for believing in inspiration. But I 
need not do more than indicate them here. Enough, 
I think, has been already said to show that this 
theory of natural inspiration cannot be accepted 
without utterly ignoring the special and dis- 
tinguishing features of the Bible. 

1 Book I. chap. ii. 



108 THE TWO_ EXTREMES. 

II. 

Verbal Inspiration. 

The reasons above adduced against believing in 
the theory of natural inspiration are amongst those 
most prominently brought forward to prove the 
opposite doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the 
Bible. This doctrine asserts that God is the author 
of Scripture in the same sense as Milton is of the 
" Paradise Lost ; " that every word is inspired of 
Him ; that the human writers were but as the pen 
which the Holy Spirit used, their personality not 
at all passing into their work ; that, therefore, the 
Bible is entirely Divine, and entirely infallible in 
every line and sentence. To insure a fair represen- 
tation of the theory, I quote the opinions of some 
of its best-known advocates. Professor Gaussen 
tells us : " The Scriptures are given and guaranteed 
by God even in their very language. They contain 
no error ; they say all that they ought to say, and 
only what they ought to say.^^ " The Bible,"' says 
Dean Burgon, "is none other than the voice of 
Him that sitteth on the throne. Every book of it, 
every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of 
it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the 
direct utterance of the Most High, supreme, abso- 
lute, faultless, unerring.'" And another writer as- 
serts : " Every syllable of it is just what it would be 



THE TWO EXTREMES. 109 

had God spoken from heaven without the interven- 
tion of any human agent/^ 

Perhaps some reader will say, " The strong ex- 
l^ressions just now quoted from some of the Bible 
writers, and even from our Lord Himself, convince 
me that this theory of verbal inspiration is most 
probably true/' Well, reader, you will find a 
good mau}^ thoughtful people disagreeing with you. 
Why ? Because, while fully receiving these argu- 
ments as a proof of God^s inspiration of the Bible, 
they have looked a little farther than the surface 
to judge how much God^s inspiration implies, and 
they cannot believe from their examination of 
Scripture that it implies what is known as verbal 
inspiration. 

They find, for example, clear traces in the 
histories that the writers, instead of having the 
words dictated to them by God, had to use their 
own brains and search old annals and traditions 
and court archives for materials ; they find that, 
with all their search, there are often some dis- 
crepancies in their accounts ; they find the Evan- 
gelists, while fully agreeing in the substance of 
their narratives, are by no means careful about 
the literal words — as, for example, in their record 
of the inscription on the Cross, where no two of 
them exactly agree ; they find St. Paul using such 
words as, " I speak as a fool," which, though quite 



110 THE TWO EXTREMES. 

natural and fitting for him, would hardly be the 
words dictated by the Holy Spirit. They find words 
spoken in the imprecatory psalms which would be 
very unfit for the lips of our Lord. 

They cannot shut their eyes to these things in 
the Bible, and however they may wish to believe 
in verbal inspiration, they cannot help preferring 
to charge these things on the human writers rather 
than to charge them upon God Himself, for there 
is no other alternative possible. 



III. 

And when' men begin thus to think seriously 
about it, disproofs arise for them in every direction. 
They see that if God were literally the author of 
the words, in the same sense as Milton and Bunyan 
are of their own productions, the style and lan- 
guage would always be perfect and always the 
same, whereas it is really often very far from per- 
fect, and with peculiarities of the writers that can 
easily be distinguished. They see how loosely the 
New Testament writers, and even the Lord Himself, 
quote the words of the older Scripture, clearly 
showing that it was not in the language, but in 
the inner substance of the thought, that they were 
accustomed to see the inspiration. They learn that 
there is incorporated in our present Bible a con- 



THE TWO EXTREMES. Ill 

siderable amount of ancient literature, from his- 
torical and other documents, and they iind it hard 
to believe that God was also the literal " author " 
of " every sentence and word and syllable and 
letter " in these ancient, long-lost books. 

And they can hardly help asking themselves, too, 
what would be the good of this verbal dictation 
of the sentences arid words and letters of Script- 
ure unless God had miraculously interfered all 
through the centuries to insure their exact trans- 
mission down to our own day ? The Revised Bible 
has taught the public what scholars have long 
known, that there is often considerable uncertainty 
about the exact words of Scripture. What advan- 
tage would it be to us that God worked a great 
miracle thousands of years ago to secure that every 
syllable should be of Divine appointment, if, as far 
as we are concerned, that miracle has very much 
failed of its purpose ? 

But it would be only waste of time to go into a 
careful refutation of this theory. The time is past 
in which it would have been necessary. Verbal 
inspiration is now recognized by most educated 
people as a theory entirely unsupported by facts, 
and is fast being thrown to the moles and the bats 
with the rest of the world^s old, discarded mind- 
lumber. 

Thus we find in the first step of our investigation 



112 THE TWO EXTREMES. 

as to how God inspired the Bible, that He did not 
inspire it in the rigid, literal manner known as verbal 
inspiration ; and that, on the other hand, He did not 
inspire it merely in the way that He inspires good 
men to write and act to-day. Laying aside, then, 
both these extreme theories, and thus narrowing the 
limits within which the true theory must lie, let 
us proceed to try if we can clear our thoughts still 
further as to what is and what is not implied in 
the fact that God has inspired the Bible. 



CHAPTER III. 

TEE EUMAN AND DIVINE. 

I. 

The Human Element in Inspiration. 

No candid student can study the phenomena 
presented by the Bible without finding in it a 
decided human element. If he try to ignore it, 
the Bible becomes a complete puzzle to him. If 
he reverently recognize it, the Bible becomes more 
simple and beautiful. Inspiration is the result of 
contact between the Spirit of God and the spirit of 
man ; or, perhaps, to put it more definitely, between 
God the Holy Ghost and the human mind and con- 
science. Neither of the two factors can be left out 
of sight ; neither, as we saw in the last chapter, can 
be unduly emphasized without causing confusion. 
When we read that " holy men of old spake as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost," we must keep both 
sides of the truth distinct. 

1. They were moved by the Holy Ghost. 

2. They were but men — 

men with like weaknesses and jjrejudices and pas- 
sions as ourselves, though purified and ennobled 



114 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

by the influence of the Holy Spirit — men each 
with his own peculiarities of manner and disposi- 
tion, each with his own education or want of 
education, each with his own way of looking at 
things, each influenced differently from another by 
the different experiences and discipline of his life. 
Their inspiration did not involve a suspension of 
their natural faculties. It did not destroy their 
personality nor abolish the differences of education 
and character. The cultured scholar wrote and 
spoke as such ; the herdsman or the fisherman 
showed his provincial training. " The poet remained 
a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian 
a historian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, 
and methods ; each to be interpreted by the laws of 
his own literature." 

To say this is not to put a slight on the Bible 
any more than it would be a slight on the earth 
to say that it is not a perfect sphere ; it is but 
to explain it, to show the truth about it, to make 
it better understood. It used to be thought that 
such statements were inconsistent with the dignity 
of the Scripture, and men who made theories of 
inspiration without testing them by facts used to 
assert that the Bible was purely Divine ; that the 
human writer was little more than a machine ; 
none of his own personality passed into his work ; 
he was but as the pen in the hands of God, who 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 115 

dictated the book ; he was but the plectrum where- 
with the Holy Spirit struck the lyre. But, as has 
been already pointed out, a more thoughtful exami- 
nation brought to light facts quite inconsistent with 
this belief. It was seen that in many respects the 
inspired books resembled ordinary uninspired works. 
The language and composition were not always of a 
high order. Each writer had his own peculiarities 
of thought and style, his own peculiar excellences 
and defects, like any modern writer. The historian 
had to make his books much in the same way as 
Mr. Froude or Professor Freeman to-day ; he had to 
gather his information from old documents already 
existing, from his own observation and memory, from 
the report of those about him. The writings were 
tinged by the ideas of the time. The author's scien- 
tific knowledge seemed in many cases circumscribed 
by the same horizon as that of his contemporaries. 
Some critics even ventured to say that they could 
detect traces of human prejudice and passions, as when 
St. Paul, quoting a Greek poet, dubbed the whole race 
of Cretans as " evil beasts and liars ; " or when the 
Psalmist indignantly cries against his oppressors, 
" Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths,^' and 
" Blessed be he that taketh thy children and dasheth 
them against the stones." 

Apart from these considerations altogether, the 
human element in the Bible is perfectly plain. A 



116 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

large part of it is taken up with the expression of 
feelings that are distinctly human — loneliness and 
sorrow, hope and fear, doubt and anguish. We 
call it all the Word of God, and in one sense 
rightly, as being all inspired of Him. But we 
must see that a large part of it is the word of man 
— the cry of the child in appeal to his Father 
— the prayers for help, the doubts and question- 
ings, the yearnings after the Unseen God. They 
are feelings such as our own, and we constantly 
acknowledge it. Is it not a large part of the 
charm in a book like the Psalms that it accu- 
rately expresses what we ourselves have felt over 
and over again ? To try, then, " to suppress the 
human side of the Bible in the interests of the 
purity of the Divine Word is as great a folly as to 
think that a father's talk with his child can be 
best reported by leaving out all that the child 
said, thought, and felt." 

This is God's way of teaching the human spirit. 
Rightly understood, the presence of the human in 
the Bible is an increasing and not a lowering of its 
value as a book of religion for men. But even if 
it were otherwise, it must be acknowledged all the 
same. Whenever we attempt to ignore it or deny 
it, or make the truth of God^s teaching depend upon 
its absence, we give a tremendous advantage to the 
enemies of religion. 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 117 

II. 

Value of the Human Element. 

We know that God could, if He pleased, have 
given His revelation Avithout the intervention of 
human minds or hands. He could have spoken 
His truths daily direct from heaven, or delivered 
them by angels, or written them across the sky, or 
branded them indelibly on the everlasting hills. 
They might thus have escaped all corruption in 
transmission ; they might thus have been at once 
universally published. And it would have been as 
easy for God to do this as to reveal truth gradu- 
ally, and sometimes dimly, through the medium 
of imperfect human minds. 

But would such a revelation have met the needs 
of humanity ? Little as we know, is it not enough 
to show us that God^s plan is, after all, the best ? 
In fact, we might ask. What other plan could even 
an objector propose ? Any communication from 
God to man must be made within the limitation 
of man's faculties. The divine can only be grasped 
by man when defined and moulded according to the 
laws of his own nature. Therefore a ready-made 
revelation in ready-made language sent down from 
heaven scarcely strikes one as a very natural or feasi- 
ble way to communicate with humanity. At any 
rate, God did not use such. He used human minds 



118 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

as the channels of His truth, because thus it could 
be better received and assimilated by the human 
minds to which it came. He used the men best 
fitted for each country and each age. He in- 
spired various characters and temperaments. He 
chose men of different tones of thought to present 
the different aspects of His many-sided truth, and 
thus to correct and supplement each other. ^ 

The quiet, contemplative John saw things in a 
different light from the other Evangelists. The 
earnest, enthusiastic Peter, with his narrow views 
and half-cultured intellect, had to be supplemented 
by the logical and broader-minded Paul, capable of 
seeing the universal scope of Christianity, and 
that all men who had faith were acceptable to 
God ; whilst James, the saintly Judaist, with his 
practical way of looking at life, saw how easily 
even the preaching of faith may be mistaken, as 
if believing were more important than doing, and 
insisted, like another Baptist, on the central truth 
of all religion, that 

" 'Tis only noble to be good." 

* To use the beautiful simile of St. Cyril of Jerusalem to illus- 
trate the action of the Holy Spirit in different men : — " One and 
the same rain comes down on all the world, yet it becomes white 
in the lily and red in the rose, and purple in the violet and 
pansies. ... In itself, indeed, it is uniform and changes 
not, but, by adapting itself to the nature of each thing that 
receives it, it becomes what is appropriate to each." 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 119 

So, too, the Divine Spirit came to men at vari- 
ous crises in their lives. He came to them in 
joy, in sorrow, in doubt, in despair, in the confi- 
dence of faith, in the fierce struggle with tempta- 
tion. Through the human spirit, in its varied 
states, He spake to the universal human spirit as 
it could never have been spoken to otherwise. He 
spake through the passionate indignation of Isaiah 
and the sorrowful plaints of Jeremiah over the 
wickedness of his race. He touched the hearts of 
the ancient Psalmists, and we hear their struggle 
with their sorrow and their sin, and their child-like 
crying after the living God. He inspired the 
stern pathos of Hosea sorrowing over the greatest 
trouble that could come to man, a wife unfaithful 
to her marriage vow, and by means of his sorrow 
and his changeless love learning Jehovah^s feelings 
towards His unfaithful people. 

Therefore it was that God thus inspired the 
Bible. He did not care so much about the accent 
or grammar or scholarship of His inspired men. 
For His purpose the throbbing heart, the flashing 
eye, the soul burning with devotion to God and 
man, were of infinitely more consequence than 
the petty accuracies of history and the infallibil- 
ity that would not let an old-world astronomer ex- 
press incorrectly a scientific fact. What did these 
dead trifles matter compared with the sympathy 



120 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

called forth by a man 8peaking to a man, by a 
human pulse touching another human pulse, bound- 
ing like its own with the hot blood of passion and 
emotion ? 

Believe this, men and women, if you would under- 
stand the Scriptures : God did not stand behind the 
human stage pulling the wires of lifeless puppets and 
marionettes. You do not like to talk of the human 
element in the Bible. You shrink from the idea of 
any imperfections, any incompleteness, any limita- 
tions. You fear to recognize human passions and emo-- 
tions ; they clash with the notions you have formed of 
inspiration. Fear not. ^' God^s light loses nothing 
of its heavenly purity because it is reflected back 
from human faces, while man gains all the advan- 
tage of the pervading presence of a sympathy 
which answers to his most varied emotions.^^ Surely 
God^s plan is wiser than ours. How more naturally 
could men be taught from Heaven? How better 
could the Bible be made the book for all humanity ? 



III. 

Evil of Ignoring the Human Element. 

" The Lord,'' said the old Jewish Rabbis, " speaks 
in the tongue of the sons of men." And it were 
better for the Bible had the Jewish Rabbis, and 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 121 

their Christian followers too, kept that fact always 
clearly in mind. For a great deal of the natural- 
ness of the Bible has been lost owing to the rigid 
theories that have so long prevailed. 

How touchingly would come to us, in its pages, 
the cry of the human spirit in its ever-changing 
moods if we recognized it as the cry of a human 
spirit like our own ! With what interest we should 
watch men struggling with temptation or question- 
ing of the mysteries of life around them if we felt, 
especially in the Old Testament, that they were 
ordinary, imperfect men like ourselves, in whom 
God's great work of character-making was only in 
progress — men who were being enlightened and 
ennobled by the Spirit of God, and who, under His 
influence, uttered naturally their thoughts and aspi- 
rations, not some mechanically dictated words from 
on high ! 

When in the dark ages of the world, before the 
fuller revelation came, a godly man fell into a 
despondent mood and gloomily spoke of the grave 
as the end of all things, it would not seem to us at 
all strange. It would seem very natural and very 
human. And if we wondered why such words of his 
were not cut out before his writings were allowed 
into the Bible, we should say that doubtless God's 
purpose was best served as it was.' And when 
^ See Chapter V. 



122 TEE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

we found words used in warlike ages that were not 
gentle and loving enough for the spirit of Chris- 
tianity, we should remember that those who used 
them were men — men who, though inspired, were 
as yet but imperfectly taught ; whose strong, pas- 
sionate impulses were not yet entirely chastened 
by the influence of the Spirit of God. We should 
think of them in a natural way, as we do of similar 
cases in secular history. When we read of the 
Covenanters on the hillside, or the Yaudois villagers 
in the awful life-and-death struggle for their faith — 



** Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, who rolled 
Mother with infant down the rocks " — 



we are not so very much shocked to hear, amid the 
prayers for deliverance, the cry also for the destruc- 
tion of their pitiless foes : not even though they 
lived in the full light of Christianity. We may 
think their prayer too harsh for Christians to use, 
but we feel that, in spite of it, they were noble, 
godly men, able to teach its grand lessons of duty, 
carrying their lives in their hands for the cause 
which they regarded as that of God and the right. 

Our sympathies enable us to enter into their 
feelings, because we read their history in a natural 
manner. But when the Bible history tells us of a 
similar case, even thougli it be in the darker ages 
of the world, all the naturalness is taken out of it 



TEE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 123 

by our early preconceptions. Just because it is in 
the Bible we do not expect the actors to be real 
and natural ! We forget that God used imperfect 
human beings as the medium of His teaching, and 
that they did not reach all at once the full height 
of their spiritual education. And so, instead of 
half sympathizing with the indignant cry of the 
oppressed for vengeance, instead of regarding it as 
we would the quick passionate cry of a hurt child 
running to his father, we charge it as a blot upon 
the "Word of God." 

Is it hard for us to understand how stern, indig- 
nant patriots, men who would willingly die for God 
and their country, should, in their passionate indig- 
nation at the cruelty and oppression around them, 
utter such vengeful prayers as we find sometimes 
in the Psalms ? If so, it is because we are ignoring 
the human element in the Bible. We think that 
God should have turned these men into passionless 
machines before He ventured to use them for the 
teaching of their fellows. We would take all the 
naturalness, all the humanity, out of them if we 
had the inspiring of them. We would have God 
use machines, and not impulsive men. Well, God 
did not use machines. God did use men, and the 
sooner we convince ourselves of that fact the more 
naturally and correctly we shall read the Bible. 



124 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE, 

IV. 

The Divine Mingling with the Human. 

It seemed necessary to emphasize especially the 
human element in the Bible. It is the side that 
up to this has been most ignored by religious people, 
and this ignoring has been in a large measure 
the cause of the present disquiet. The Biblical 
Studies of the past half-century, too, have tended 
to show that this human is a larger element than 
men thought ; that the freedom of the authors is 
much less restricted. It is, therefore, necessary to 
a true understanding of the Bible that this side 
should be kept very prominently before us. 

But the very necessity in our day of emphasizing 
the human side of Revelation makes it the more 
incumbent on us not to ignore the Divine. The 
history of human thought teaches us its continual 
tendency to swing from one extreme to another, 
and, pendulum-like, the more it has swung to one 
side the farther will be the rebound when it comes 
to the other. We must guard ourselves against 
that danger. While recognizing to the full the 
human medium through which the Divine has come 
to us, we must remember that it is only a medium, 
that that which is beneath and behind and within 
it is the power of the Spirit of God. 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 125 

We cannot draw a line between the Divine and 
the human. We cannct say of any part, " This is 
Divine/" or " That is human/" In some parts, as the 
Gospels, there seems more of the Divine ; in others, 
as the Chronicles, more of the human. It is as 
a mine of precious ore where the gold is mingled 
with the rock and clay, the ore is richer in one 
part than another, but all the parts are glittering 
with gold. It is as sunlight through a painted 
window. The light must come to us coloured by 
tlie medium. We cannot get it any other way. 
In some parts the medium is denser and more im- 
perfect ; in others the golden glory comes dazzlingly 
through. The light cannot be separated from 
the tint given by the medium. Every ray is 
mingled light and colour. It is foolish to ignore 
the existence of this medium. It leads to mis- 
imderstanding and disquiet, and wonder that the 
light is not absolutely pure. But how much more 
foolish to ignore the light and deem that the tinted 
dome is luminous itself, that the light of heaven 
has only come from earth ! There is no noble 
teaching without the Spirit of God ; there is no 
true light for the soul of man but through " the 
Light that lighteth every man coming into the 
world."' 



126 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE, 

V. 

The Nature of Christ and the Nature of the 
Bible. 

A wonderful illustration of the nature of the 
Bible is gained from study of the nature of our 
Lord. N^ay, is it not far more than an illustra- 
tion? Are they not each the revelation of the 
Divine to man through the human ? And does not 
this, in a great measure, account for the correspond- 
ence ? Is not this Written Word the imperfect 
human presentation of Him who, in His inner 
essence and nature, is unknowable to us ? And 
may we not reverently say the same of that other 
" Word ^' who was in the beginning with God, and 
who Himself was God ? 

In both ^is the mingling of the Divine and the 
human. In Him the Divine nature shrouding 
itself in weak, imperfect humanity — in It the 
Divine Spirit revealing itself through faulty human 
minds in imperfect human language. In Him is 
the Godhead flashing out in His mighty miracles 
and revelations of the unseen, and the poor com- 
mon manhood showing itself in weakness and weari- 
ness and hunger and pain — in It the Divinity 
appearing in prophecy and revelation and lofty 
moral teaching, and the humanity revealing itself 
in the warmth of human passion and impatience, 



1 



THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 12 Y 

and the chill of human despondency and fear. In 
Him the grand words of God and righteousness 
and the mysteries of the future alternating (as 
they must have done) with ordinary trivial words 
of the daily food and rest and the common inter- 
course of life — in It the prophecy and revelation 
and the God-like lesson of nobleness and good 
mingled with comparatively unimportant stories 
and genealogies and passages of history that some- 
times seem to have but little bearing on the life 
of to-day. 

In Him, too, was a gradual groioth in wisdom. 
Had He been omniscient from His childhood He 
would not have been perfect man. And in It we 
have a corresponding growth, a gradual develop- 
ment in moral and spiritual teaching, and in clear- 
ness of revelation of the Divine mysteries ; so that, 
as the Lord Himself has taught us, the teaching 
of the Old Testament days is on a lower plane 
than that of the New. Nay, we may without ir- 
reverence go even further still in our comparison. 
In Him, even to the end of His earthly life, were 
certain limitations of knowledge and power, owing 
to the restriction laid on Him by His humanity : 
" Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, . . . 
not even the Son, but the Father." If this could 
be so even in the Christ-Word Himself, need we 
wonder to find in the Written Word traces of the 



128 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE. 

writers' human ignorance in branches of secular 
knowledge which were left by God for gradual dis- 
covery in the after-ages ? 

But we must not anticipate the chapters on 
Infallibility and Development. It may be helpful 
to many readers to trace out more fully for them- 
selves this correspondence, which is but barely 
touched on here, between the nature of the Lord 
and the nature of the Bible. It may help to 
remove prejudice against truths that are most im- 
portant for a right understanding of the Scriptures. 
It may lead some to think of that false expectation 
of a " Coming One " in perfect majesty and glory 
which hindered the Jews^ reception of the humble 
Messiah and led them to sneer at " the carpenter^'s 
son/" It may lead some to ask, "If that false 
conception of what the Messiah ought to be was 
such an obstacle to a ready belief in His Divinity, 
may not a similar false conception be an obstacle to 
the Bible to-day ? If Christ had to say, why should 
not the Bible have to say too, ^ Blessed is he who 
shall not find occasion of stumbling in me ' ? " 



i 



li 



CHAPTER IV. 

IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 
I. 
What Human Theories Claim. 

I have tried to point out all through this book 
that most of the difficulties which men find in the 
Bible arise from their own wrong notions about it ; 
from their makmg certain assumptions which they 
are quite unwarranted in making, and then expecting 
the Bible never to clash with them. Two of these 
popular assumptions stand out above all the rest as 
esj^ecially fruitful in difficulties. In this chapter we 
shall deal with the first. 

ASSUMPTION I.— It is necessary for God's 
teaching of moral and spiritual truths that He 
should guard Sis teachers against the slightest 
inaccuracy in any partictdar. 

In other words, If the Bible be inspired it must 
be absolutely infallible, not only in religious but in 
secular matters. Its writers must have been divinely 
guarded from error in every detail. Its history, 
its geology, its astronomy must be accepted as 
scientifically correct, and not merely as representing 



130 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 

the knowledge of the time. There is no possibility 
of any inaccuracy arising from the ignorance of the 
writers or from error in the sources from which 
their history was derived. 

From this the conclusion inevitably follows that 
if one can prove any false notions of science or any 
inaccurate details of history in the writers of three 
thousand years ago, we must at once give up believ- 
ing in the inspiration of the Bible. 

This seems a very extreme position to take, and 
yet it is taken in all good faith by a large number 
of religious people. There is a statement in Dr. 
Lee's "Inspiration," the chief text-book still on 
the subject, to the effect that chronological and 
geographical details, as well as matters of physi- 
cal science, mentioned in the Bible must in every 
portion of every book be held to have been stated 
with infallible accuracy.^ Let me quote other au- 
thoritative utterances :— '' God presided over the 
sacred writers in their entire work of writing, with 
the design and effect of making that writing an 
errorless record.'''' "This infallibility and authority 
attach as well to the verbal expression in which 
the revelation is conveyed as to the revelation 
itself." ^ " ^ proved error in Scripture contradicts 
not only our doctrine but the Bible claims, 

1 Preface to third edition, p. xiv. 

2 Hodge's Commentary on Confession of Faith. 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 131 

and therefore its inspiration in making those 
claims." * 

If this be the only position to take, that a single 
proved error must disprove inspiration, let us by all 
means insist on it at any cost of disturbance to our 
beliefs. But if not, then surely those who take it 
are unnecessarily causing serious danger to the 
Bible, putting stumbling-blocks before their dis- 
quieted brethren, and giving very powerful vantage- 
ground for the infideFs assault. We must ask, then. 
Are we bound to take this position ? Nay, further, 
Is there any warrant at all for taking it ? 



II. 
What the Scriptures Claim. 

Let me repeat again the important words of 
Bishop Butler, already referred to. " We are in no 
sort judges beforehand ... by what methods 
and in what proportion it were to be expected that 
this supernatural light and instruction would be 
afforded us. . . . The only question concerning 
the authority of Scripture is whether it be what it 
claims to be, not whether it be a book of such sort or 
so promulged as w^eak men are apt to fancy a book 
containing a Divine revelation should be. And 
therefore neither obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy 
' Presbyterian Review, vol. ii. p. 245. 



132 TS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 

of style, nor early disputes about the authors, nor 
any other things of the like kind, though they had 
been much more considerable than they are, could 
overthrow the authority of the Scripture, tmless the 
prophets, apostles, or our Lord, had promised that 
the hook contaming the Divine revelation should he 
secure from those things^ 

Now, did the apostles or prophets or our Lord 
ever promise that the Book should be free from such 
things ? Does the Bible anywhere make such claim 
of universal inerrancy for its writers? Has any 
Biblical writer asserted, or even implied, that he 
was Divinely guarded from the possibility of ever 
making a mistake in the little details of his work ? 
Or have some of the writers borne this testimony 
concerning any of those who preceded them, or 
has any one writer left it on record that he was 
commanded by special inspiration to declare the 
infallibility of the rest? 

Most certainly no such statement can be pro- 
duced. 

But some one will say. Surely the fact of inspi- 
ration is quite sufficient to prove that inaccuracy in 
the slightest degree is impossible. Not at all. If 
God's purpose would be just as well accomplished 
by histories of ordinary accuracy, like our English 
histories to-day, we have no right to assume that 
He would supernaturally enlighten the writers on 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 133 

little details that in no way concern the purpose of 
the book. For instance, in the Old Testament the 
sacred writers inform us that much of their history- 
is a compilation from ancient, long-lost sources, the 
Books of Gad and Iddo, the seers, the chronicles of 
the kings of Israel, etc. We have every reason to 
believe in the substantial accuracy of these ancient 
sources, the national annals of the people, but surely 
we have no right to assume that in no one of them 
could there have been a slip in a Levitical genea- 
logy, or in the number of King Solomon^s horses, 
or that, if there had been, God must have infallibly 
corrected it by a miracle. Unless, indeed, such 
minute accuracy were necessary to His purpose. Of 
this we shall be better able to judge later on. 

If the reader has followed me in dropping the 
extreme theory of verbal inspiration, he must see 
that, without direct proof from the Bible itself, he 
is not warranted in asserting of any writer absolute 
infallibility in every detail. As the mere mechanical 
pen or mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit writing down 
or uttering words from Divine dictation, we might 
very well have believed in his making an error- 
less record. But if it be not true that the Bible 
historian could write without referring to any 
documents, put down dates infallibly correct with- 
out consulting any chronology ; if he had to col- 
lect his materials like our own historians to-day 



134 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE ? 

from tlie annals of the colleges of prophets, from the 
archaic books of Jashar and the Wars of Jehovah, 
from ancient traditions, from the records of village 
and town and court, from his own memory and 
the testimony of his contemporaries — then it is a 
very large assumption indeed that no detail of his 
history or his science or his information on any 
subject could possibly err. Nothing less than a 
direct assertion of the inspired writers could warrant 
such an assumption. 

And nowhere, I repeat, is such an assertion made. 
The writers never claim absolute immunity from 
error. It certainly is not their fault if we persist 
in making such a claim for them. For it would 
almost seem as if the Bible had tried specially to 
guard us against doing so, particularly in the case 
of the Old Testament. The inspired historians 
almost go out of their way to tell us that their 
histories were no direct revelation from God, that 
they had to gather the materials from ordinary 
uninspired writings in the ancient annals of the 
nation. In such cases as the Books of Kings and 
Chronicles they give us parallel histories of the 
same events that do not at all agree in the smaller 
details, and sometimes leave discrepancies that seem 
impossible to reconcile. They are just the sort of 
discrepancies that would occur in any set of good, 
trustworthy histories compared together — the sort 



IS TEE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 135 

of discrepancies the absence of which would make 
one suspicious of collusion in ordinary human nar- 
ratives. Perhaps they could be reconciled if we 
knew all the facts. Perhaps they could not. No 
one that understands the nature of the Bible would 
care in the smallest degree whether they could or 
not. But, at any rate, they are a standing protest 
against the dogmatism that would risk the belief 
in the inspiration of Scripture on the question of 
some petty inaccuracy of detail. 

III. 
What Commdn Sense Claims. 

God, then, has nowhere told us that inspiration 
must necessarily imply infallible accuracy on every 
subject. But still it is said — and this is the chief 
reason for men^s dogmatism about it — " If there 
were a possibility of inaccuracy in any direction, 
even though quite unconnected with morals and 
religion, the Bible would not be trustworthy as a 
guide for men. If not absolutely infallible in every 
direction, how can we feel confident about its in- 
fallibility in the one direction where its truth is so 
vitally important ? " 

Now, is it reasonable to judge thus of the Bible? 
Do we ever judge so with regard to other knowl- 
edge? Must a man be infallible in every direction 



136 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 

in order that he may be a trustworthy guide in one 
direction ? Must a physician know all about farm- 
ing and mining and law and navigation in order 
that he may direct us in matters of health ? Do we 
regard it as perilous to the doctrine of a preacher 
if he mistake the author's name in some quotation 
in his sermon? 

Nay, further, should not the whole analogy from 
God's way of communicating ordinary knowledge 
lead us rather to expect that His teachers of religion 
would oiot be made infallible in every direction ? 
We find His ordinary course is to endow certain 
men with faculties that enable them to deal with 
particular studies while leaving them* in other things 
comparatively ignorant. The great geniuses in 
poetry, or painting, or music, or mathematics are 
but indifferently acquainted with many matters out- 
side their own province. If this be God's ordinary 
course of teaching in such things, is there not a 
strong presumption that He has adopted the same 
course in teaching religion ? 

Of course God might have made every inspired 
writer absolutely infallible and omniscient in all the 
mysteries of the universe. But that is not the 
question. The question is. Have we reason to be- 
lieve that God did this ? and was it necessary for 
His purpose that He must do it ? 

We must always judge of God^s unknown deal- 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 137 

ings by the analogy of His known dealings. And 
there we find that " His method is one of sufficiency, 
not perfection ; of sufficiency for the attainment of 
practical ends, not of conformity to ideal standards/'' 
Let us see, then, whether this principle of sufficiency 
is here carried out. Let us inquire what was God's 
purpose in giving us the Bible, that we may be able 
to judge whether such absolute inerrancy is really 
necessary for the attainment of that purpose. 



IV. 

The Purpose of Scripture. 

This question of God's purpose in inspiration is 
one which is easily enough answered. It will call 
forth, probably, but little difference of opinion. And 
yet it is a very important question. For by keeping 
its answer steadily in view we shall best see how 
unimportant are many of the disputed points which 
are causing so much of the present disquiet about 
the Bible. 

What, then, is the purpose of inspiration ? Is it 
to insure that we shall have clear and infallible 
information on certain questions of geology and 
astronomy, or on the way in which God created the 
heavens and the earth ? Is it to keep us from 
mistakes about the history of Israel ; to give us 



138 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 

minutely accurate information about the length of 
every reign and the exact number of men who fell 
in the little tribal battles of the inhabitants of 
Palestine ? 

Surely not. God had no intention of giving us 
an encyclopaedia of general knowledge, and thus 
depriving us of the discipline of acquiring such 
knowledge for ourselves. The Holy Spirit who in- 
spired the Bible knew that these little details of 
genealogies and battles and such-like in the history 
of Israel were not a whit more important to us than 
similar details in the history of England. The Bible 
has no concern except incidentally with any such 
matters as these. 

Inspiration is concerned with what is to us in- 
finitely of more importance — even the guidance of 
our conduct, the building up of noble characters for 
God. It has been well said that conduct forms 
three-fourths of human life, and it is with these 
three-fourths that the inspired writings have to do. 
Their inspiration therefore consists not so much in 
their infallible science or minutely accurate details 
of history, as in their teaching God^s will and 
God^s relation to men. One of their own inspired 
writers tells us of their use. They are all, he says, 
given by inspiration of God, and are profitable 
for — what ? Mosaic cosmogonies and Hebrew his- 
tories ? Nothing of the kind. For doctrine, for 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 139 

reproof, for correction, for instruction iji righteous- 
ness.^ 

These Scriptures are God's inspired lesson-books 
for humanity. Their writers are the great masters 
for the teaching of the world. If a man wants to 
train himself for poetry or painting or sculpture, he 
will make himself familiar with the great masters 
and the great nations and the great writings that 
have concerned themselves specially with these pur- 
suits. If a man wants to train himself for righteous- 
ness and for God, he will make himself familiar 
with the masters and the nation and the writings 
inspired for that purpose. 

These writings concern themselves with the 
great moral and spiritual facts, duty, character, 
moral responsibility, the happiness that comes from 
harmony with the will of God. Their object is to 
teach the eternal contrast between Righteousness 
and Unrighteousness, Obedience and Disobedience, 
Selfishness and Self-sacrifice, Purity and Lust ; to 
teach men that God is on the side of holiness and 
good, that His help and sympathy are near in the 
fierce fight with temptation, and that even when the 
fight is lost and the life defiled, there is a way 
back to holiness and God if men will but earnestly 
seek it. 

1 2 Tim. ill. IG. 



140 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 

V. 
Its Method of Teaching. 

For the revealing of such truths the Bible was 
given. But they were not revealed in cut-and-drj 
propositions dropped down to us from heaven, 
such as : — 

God has sympathy with me:n'. 

God hates impubity and fraud. 

God roRGivES the sorrowing penitent. 

If they had been, we might have reasonably expected 
absolute verbal infallibility in every jot and tittle. 
But no. Not through golden aphorisms or finished 
articles of belief, but through the medium of history 
and dialogue and poetry and drama did God reveal 
Himself. In the incidents of the patriarchal history, 
in the story of the Jewish kingdom, in the fervid 
utterances of the prophets, in the intercourse with 
the peasantry of One who in guise of a poor Galilean 
workman hid the Majesty of Almighty God — thus 
were men allowed to gather for themselves their 
ideas of God and of His will for man. The books 
of the Bible are the records of His gradual educa- 
tion, moral and spiritual, of the people of Israel, 
and His revelation of Himself through them to the 
world outside. 

Take, for example, the history of the Judges. 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 14 1 

Here is a constant iteration of the same lesson. 
First we see the people sinning and forgetting God. 
Then comes their punishment at the hand of the 
tyrant whom God has permitted to work His will. 
Then the poor distressed creatures crying in their 
pain and their penitence to Him whom they had 
grieved. And straightway the deliverer raised up 
to help them. Soon they are back at their evil 
courses. Again the old story is repeated, and again 
we trace the old round of sinning and punishment, 
and repenting and deliverance, and sinning and pun- 
ishment, and repenting and deliverance, with the 
hand of God manifest through it all. 

We see at once the main lesson of the book. It 
is a true record, for our learning, of God's dealing 
with men. God^s inspiration has taught that 
historian the true philosophy of history : that God 
stands behind all human life, though it seems to 
men as if things happened by chance ; that He 
hates and punishes sin in nation or individual, 
though men think sometimes that they may do 
what they will ; that it is not by accident, but by 
the working of God's laws, that the punishment 
comes ; that when the suffering, sorrowing sinner 
cries aloud to Him in his penitence and pain, He is 
still " the Lord God, merciful and gracious, forgiv- 
ing iniquity and transgression and sin.^' 



142 IS TEE BIBLE INFALLIBLE 9 

VI. 
What Infallibility is needed. 

We see then that the purpose of the Bible is that 
it should reveal God and His relation to man. In it 
are recorded and interpreted certain historical facts, 
and the sole value to us of these facts and their 
interpretation is that the knowledge of them may 
lead us to the knowledge of the personal self -reveal- 
ing God, His will. His dealings. His relation to us. 
This is God's great design for man. "This is life 
eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.^' 

The important matter then in the inspired writ- 
ings is that they should be competent teachers, 
where alone we need their teaching, as to the rela- 
tion of God to man and the dealings of God with 
man. For this it is necessary that the history should 
be trustworthy history, that the record of the facts 
should be substantially accurate, and be sufficient to 
teach what God wants us to know of His dealings 
with mankind. But for this is it necessary that the 
numbers of the armies should be infallibly exact, or 
that every passing reference to geology or astronomy 
should be scientifically correct ? Would it be very 
dangerous to religion if an inspired writer thought, 
with the wisest men of his day, that the sun went 
round the earth, or if he had to choose between two 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 143 

conflicting accounts of the price paid for Araunali's 
threshing-floor ? ^ What should we say of the man 
who held such opinions with regard to any other 
history — who should say, for example, that the les- 
sons of English history were vitiated by the fact 
that the different accounts of the battle of Crecy did 
not exactly agree as to the order of battle array, or 
that one of the mediseval chroniclers believed in the 
existence of witchcraft ? 

We must treat our Bibles as sensibly as we treat 
our English histories. We must see that it was 
not necessary for God^s purpose that every inspired 
writer should be universally infallible. If a voice 
from heaven were to-morrow to guarantee to us the 
absolute accuracy of every little jot and tittle of 
their history and science, the real value of the in- 
spired books would not be one whit increased. 

VII. 
Is the Bible Infallible? 

Thus, then, we answer the question. Is the Bible 
infallible ? Yes, the Bible is infallible in revealing 
God and teaching men all that is necessary for sal- 
vation. It is infallible in pointing men to Christ 
and leading them to higher and holier lives. Its 
infallibility is complete as to its peculiar message as 
^ Cf . 2 Sam. xxiv. 24, with 1 Chron. xxi. 25. 



144 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE ? 

to all that it professes to be and all that it professes 
to do. " Within this sphere it contains no error. 
Here it never misleads, never deceives, never goes 
wrong. All that it teaches about faith in God, in 
Christ, in truth, in righteousness, in moral love, in 
the wisdom of a life spent in the fear of God, has 
proved its absolute trustworthiness. And as trust- 
worthy are its teachings as to where human life goes 
wrong, as to where the right way in all matters of 
conduct lies, as to how a life of righteousness may 
be attained, as to how manhood may be perfected in 
a life of likeness to God.^' ' 

Here the Bible is absolutely infallible. And let 
us remember this is the only infallibility required of 
it. Whether it be also infallible in every minutest 
reference to history or science is a question that 
need very little concern us. It is a matter of mere 
literary interest, and as such may be discussed with 
untroubled heart. 

YIIL 
Danger of Popular Notions of Infallibility. 

One step farther. Not only is it unwarranted 
and unnecessary, this insistence on the absolute 
infallibility of Scripture in every detail ; it is also 
extremely dangerous to men's belief in inspiration. 
What, think you, made an infidel of Ernest Renan, 
' Thomson, Revelation and the Bible, p. 252. 



IJS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 145 

one of the ablest of modern French writers ? The 
belief that inspiration was bound up with infalli- 
bility. What turned the late Charles Bradlaugh 
into a bitter enemy of the Bible ? The fact that 
the clergyman who prepared him for Confirmation 
sternly banned the questions of the thoughtful boy 
because of his own rigid theories about the Scrip- 
tures. How many cases do you know yourself, 
my reader, of men's faith being overthrown by such 
teaching? A few months ago the experience came 
closely home to me in the overthrow of the belief 
of one of my closest friends. 

Believe me, they are mistaken friends of the Bible 
who insist on binding up inspiration with such ques- 
tions as this. When religious teachers can be found 
to assert that the existence of a proved inaccuracy 
would overthrow inspiration, when the plain mean- 
ing of words is strained to explain away some trifling 
discrepancy of numbers, or to reconcile early human 
notions with the science of to-day, these things 
bring not gain, but peril to the Bible. One would 
think our salvation depended on the accuracy of 
the infant sciences of Israel, or that religion was 
imperilled if we could not satisfactorily establish 
that the number of the first-born was 22,273 ! 
Until men cast aside such petty notions about in- 
spiration, until they are taught that God's procla- 
mation of the eternal law of righteousness is utterly 
10 



146 IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE? 

iDdependent of such pedantic trivialities, there will 
be no true understanding of the Bible, and no peace 
from such stupid assaults of its enemies. 

Let us refuse to be in bondage to such notions 
as these. Let us know the truth, and the truth shall 
make us free. Thus shall we gain in the stability of 
our belief, and, it may be, many besides ourselves 
will gain by it too. For may we not hope, if we lay 
aside our unwarranted theories, that much of the 
misconceptions and hostility to the Bible will gradu- 
ally clear away? Our secularists and infidels do not 
all want to be such. We by our foolish notions have 
driven many of them to unbelief. Let them see that 
Christian men need not be unreasoning bigots ; that 
the Church, which condemns the tricks of trade, will 
equally condemn playing tricks with evidence. Let 
them see that truth alone is the object of our quest, 
and that we are fearless and unprejudiced in the 
pursuit of that truth, and we shall have done much 
towards winning back to religion those who are 
honest and sincere in their unbelief. 

IX. 
A Caution. 

Let me close with a few words of caution. In 
dwelling so fully on the possibility of scientific or 
historical inaccuracies in Scripture, there is a danger 
of very much exaggerating the importance of the 



IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE ? 147 

subject. The reader must clearly keep in mind — (1) 
That there are but few, and chiefly insignificant 
cases, where there is any question of accuracy raised. 
(2) That even of these, some are certainlj^ due to 
errors of copyists, and did not appear at all in the 
original writings. (3) That allowance must always 
be made for our ignorance of the unrecorded cir- 
cumstances necessary to complete the story, and for 
the fact that when different true accounts of the 
same incident, written with extreme brevity, are put 
together, an ignorant reader may easily imagine 
errors and contradictions where none exist. It 
would be easy to give instructive examples of this 
from secular history. 

Therefore, while we dare not insist on the absolute 
infallibility of history or science in the Bible, we 
should recognize that the question is of little im- 
portance. And let me add, too, that the dwelling 
on such matters — the little flaws in the earthen ves- 
sel which holds God's treasure — is of little profit, 
except for such as are disquieted about them. In 
the wide extent of God's rich pastures there is surely 
small need of feeding on " difficulties and discrepan- 
cies." If we study not our Bibles for spiritual food, 
such studies as this will but wither and enfeeble us. 
As old Fuller quaintly and wisely puts it — " If men 
will not eat the plain meat of God's Word, they shall 
not wonder if they be choked with the bones thereof." 



CHAPTER V. 

PR0GRES81YENESS OF GOD'S TEACHING, 

I. 

The Moral Difficulties of the Old Testament. 

In the previous chapter I referred to the two 
popular assumptions that stand out above all the 
rest as especially fruitful in causing doubt and dis- 
quiet. The first of them, which was there dealt 
with, is the chief cause of intellectual difficulties 
about the Bible ; the second is the chief cause of 
MOEAL difficulties. With this second assumption we 
have now to deal. 

ASSUMPTIOISr II.— It is essential to ins2nra- 
tion that God's teaching of moral and spiritual 
truths shoidd not be a growth through lower and 
more iMperfect stages, but shoidd appear from 
the beginning in its ftdl perfection. 

This is the more dangerous assumption of the two. 
To most ]jeople, after all, the intellectual are not the 
really important difficulties in Scripture. Common 
sense soon helps them to see that it is not necessary 
for God to make an inspired writer infallible in lit- 



PR0GRE8S1VENES8 OF GOB'S TEACHING. 149 

eraiy and scientific matters in order that he may be 
able to teach men the beauty of holiness. The 
really formidable difficulties arise from the fact that 
some of the Old Testament utterances seem to fall 
below the level of the enlightened Christian con- 
science. How, it is asked, can such utterances have 
been inspired by the Holy Ghost ? 

For instance. We find in early days low and 
crude conceptions of God, as of a mere tribal Deity, 
who cared only for Israel, and was hostile, or at least 
indifferent, to all nations beside. We find slavery 
permitted in the Bible, and plurality of wives, and 
a man allowed to divorce his wife by merely writing 
her a paper of divorcement. We read with repul- 
sion of that act of treachery which Deborah the 
prophetess greeted with a triumphal benediction 
higher than that bestowed upon the Virgin Mother 
herself — • 

" Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heher the 
Kenite be." 

In the midst of the most devotional Psalms we are 
sometimes startled by a vigorous prayer for God's 
vengeance upon sinners, or worse still, upon men 
who have ill-treated the Psalmist himself. We can- 
not think that Jesus Christ would have approved of 
such sentiments. We feel that even we ourselves 
cannot approve of them. 



150 PROGBESSIYENESS OF 

11. 
A Rational Method of Education. 

True, these difficulties are but as a few insignificant 
spots on the beauty of the moral teaching of the 
Bible. But yet they cannot be shirked if we are 
honestly trying to understand inspiration. I know 
that some people, whose reverence for Scripture is not 
sufficiently tempered with common sense, consider 
it wrong to question the morality of these matters. 
It seems to them "a presumptuous setting of one's 
own conscience to judge of the Bible." Coleridge 
in his " Confessions " tells of a good divine who, 
when questioned about the praise worthiness of 
Jael's act, closed the controversy by observing 
that, " for his part, he wanted no better morality 
than that of the Bible, and no other proof of an 
action being praiseworthy than that the Bible had 
declared it worthy of praise." 

Such men are a great source of danger to the Bible. 
I fear there are still many like him, and I there- 
fore want here most positively to insist that in your 
reading of the Bible you must fearlessly reject any 
meaning of a passage which clashes with the dic- 
tates of the universal ^ Christian conscience. God 

^ Notice that I do not say " which clashes with my individual 
conscience or yours," since my conscience or yours may chance 
to be disordered or mistaken ; but of the utterance of. the col- 
lective conscience of educated Christian men one may safely 
say, " Vox populi, vox Dei." 



GOD'S TEACHING. 151 

gave you your conscience as well as your Bible. 
Through conscience is the Divine Spirit^s way of 
communicating with the human spirit, and there- 
fore any interpretation of a passage which clashes 
with men^s highest sense of what is right and true 
must ever be regarded with suspicion and distrj^st. 

It is sad to tliink that such words as these should 
be needed at the close of the nineteenth century, 
but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they 
are needed, and that sore injury has been done to 
the cause of religion by the neglect of thus using the 
God-given conscience in the interpretation of the 
Word of God. 

It has often been asserted thaf we must not ven- 
ture to argue from man^s notions of what is right 
and wrong ; that even if we were told, what men 
have often been told, that a doctrine taught in Scrip- 
ture means something that clashes with men's highest 
sense of what is generous and right and fair, yet our 
moral shrinking from it must not weigh one jot — 
true, child-like faith, we are told, will accept it with- 
out hesitation ! 

True, child-like faith, believe me, will do nothing 
of the kind ; and it is a most pernicious thing, sub- 
versive of all true religion, to speak thus of faith. 
True faith in God means faith in a Person, faith in a 
Character, faith in an Infinite Justice and Love and 
Holiness and Nobleness and Generosity ; faith in a 



152 PR0GRESSIVENES8 OF 

God who, if I may so speak, would lay down His 
Godhead itself before He would consent to do any- 
thing unfair or ungenerous or unkind to any man. 
This is the faith you must pray for in your Bible- 
reading. You must be like a loving, trustful child, 
always loyal to your Father and jealous for His 
character, and refusing to believe anything unworthy 
of Him, even though men should think they find it 
in His written Word. 

If any of my readers is satisfied, like Coleridge^s 
cleric, that conscience must not judge of the morality 
of the Bible, he need not trouble himself to read 
any farther ; if otherwise, let me try to help him if 
I can. My plan will be to take him away from 
these difficulties for the present, and bring him back 
to them again at the close of the chapter. Mean- 
time let me try to put him in a better position to 
judge of them. 

I want to point out that these difficulties arise 
from people starting with a false assumption. 
They say, " If God the Holy Ghost was the teacher 
in the Old Testament, He must at all times have 
taught the highest and noblest duties. Anything 
of crudeness or imperfection, or lower moral teach- 
ing, would be incredible at any period as proceeding 
from God." Now I distinctly challenge that as- 
sumption. I say you have no right at all to make 
it. I want to show you from your own method of 



OOD'8 TEACHING. 153 

educating your children that what you expect 
in the Bible would be both unwise and unnatural, 
and that what you ought to expect is exactly what 
you find — a lower and more elementary teaching 
rising up slowly step by step till it is crowned at 
last by the teaching of Jesus Christ. 

III. 
First Illustration. 

In all our educational work we recognize without 
any hesitation the law of gradual growth, gradual 
development. We know that we must begin at the 
lowest rudiments, that very crude and imperfect 
conceptions must satisfy us at first ; in fact, that 
higher knowledge would be useless, if not misleading, 
until the mind has grown sufficiently to appreciate it. 

The mathematical genius, with his keen intel- 
lectual delight in solving the most difficult problems 
of the universe, can look back to a stage when such 
problems would have been utterly unintelligible to 
him, and therefore would have been very unfit ob- 
jects of study to put before him. He never thinks of 
putting such studies before his boy, who is just begin- 
ning to master the rudiments of Euclid. He knows 
that a long and gradual training is needed before 
the child can clearly see even that the square on the 
hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the 



154 PB0GRESSIVENE88 OF 

sum of the squares on the other two sides, and a 
still longer training before he has grasped the truth 
that that mathematical fact must necessarily be true 
of every right-angled triangle in the whole universe 
of space. The father can hardly remember Ihe time 
when such discoveries were new to himself. He 
looks back along the almost endless range of upward 
intellectual steps which still lie between his boy 
and him. But if he is wise he does not try to 
hasten things too much. He does not say, ** I know 
that this higher knowledge of mine is true and 
valuable, and full of intellectual delight to me ; 
therefore I shall insist at once on teaching it to my 
son. Why should he be content with lower knowl- 
edge when the other is so much higher and grander 
and more beautiful ? " No; he sees that the mind of 
his son is not fitted for it at its present stage, and 
so he wisely and patiently waits for his natural and 
gradual development. 

IV. 

Second Illustration. 

And is not this equally true of our attempts at 
moral and religious training? Place a wise, judicious 
Christian man at the head of a reformatory where the 
boys have been gathered in from the lowest slums, 
and with all their evil habits strong upon them. 



OOD'S TEACHING. 155 

Will he begin by insisting on a complete sweep 
of all their faults and foibles, and lay down strict 
rules of lofty conduct, the beauty of which the boys 
are not able to appreciate, and the enforcement of 
which will probably drive them into open rebellion ? 

Nay, surely, if he be a wise man he will at first 
overlook much that grieves and disappoints him, 
remembering the law of gradual development. He 
will hail with satisfaction the slightest improve- 
ment, and wait perhaps for years for any real 
character-growth. 

He begins with a set of depraved, neglected youths, 
to whom stealing and swearing and drinking, and 
worse, are amongst the common incidents of life. 
He is an earnest, prayerful man. He is daily asking 
for his degraded boys that God would " cleanse the 
thoughts of their hearts by the inspiration of His 
Holy Spirit.'^ But he believes that the presence of 
God's Holy Spirit does not necessarily imply the 
absence of all error and wrongdoing ; that it implies 
only the possession of some truth, some life — often 
very little truth and life indeed. And thus believ- 
ing, he patiently waits, teaching, praying, hoping 
still. 

At the end of a year some of these boys have 
grown attached to him, and to please him, not at 
all for any higher reason, they try to be better 
boys. He sees, and thanks God for this first 



156 PR00EE88IVENES8 OF 

symptom of growth. The curbing of some evil 
habits, even in a small degree and in order to please 
him, he regards as the first step towards curbing 
them a great deal by-and-by in order to please God. 

Thus lovingly, prayerfully, hopefully, the master 
will watch over them in his slow, patient system of 
education. He will care more for a very little 
growth of real character than for any amount of 
strict external conformity. He will be content to 
move slowly, to win his way by almost impercep- 
tible degrees. He will give hearty approval to acts 
which, for these boys, really mean progress upward, 
though to the outer world they seem acts rather to 
be censured than praised. He will be content for 
a time with very crude and imperfect notions of 
God and religion. He will "put himself in the 
place " of the poor faulty strugglers upward, and try 
to understand and sympathize with them ; and, above 
all, he will try never to lose faith in the ultimate 
progress of his boys. 

By-and-by, when some of these boys have grown 
into noble, high-minded Christian men, trying to 
follow more closely the path of the Crucified, will 
they not look back on the early training and the 
early notions as on a lower stage that they have 
long since passed, and yet will they not confess 
that this lower stage was a necessary part of their 
progress upward to a higher life ? 



OOD'S TE AGEING. 157 

V. 
Brahmin Development— an Illustration. 

To use an illustration from the history of heathen- 
ism : — In Professor Max Miiller^s account of the 
Brahmin religious teaching in India ^ we learn that 
the pupils pass through three stages of religious de- 
Telopraent — that of the student, the householder, the 
philosopher. The student is rigorously brought up 
in learning by heart the faith of the Vedas, the 
sacred books. In this faith as householder he be- 
lieves and prays and sacrifices. But in the third 
stage, when his children are grown up and his hair is 
gray, he is emancipated from these lower forms, and 
concentrates his thoughts on the Eternal Self alone. 
The Vedas have now become lower knowledge to 
him. The gods Agni and Indra become as mere 
names. •* For thousands of years there have been 
Brahman families in which the son still learns by 
heart the ancient hymns, and the father performs day 
by day his sacred duties and sacrifices ; while the 
grandfather looks on all ceremonies and sacrifices as 
vanity, sees even in the Vedic gods nothing but the 
names of what he knows to be beyond all names, and 
seeks rest in the highest knowledge only. The 
grandfather does not look with contempt on the less 

' See J. M. Wilson's ''Letter to a Bristol Artisan ;~ a letter 
deeplr interesting and fmitf ui in sugs-esticai. 



158 PR0GBE8SIVENESS OF 



1 



enlightened son or grandson ; nor do they, though 
strictly bound by the minutest rules of the old ritual, 
speak unkindly of him. They know that he has 
passed through the narrower path, and so do not 
grudge him the freedom and wider horizon of the 
higher views he has attained to." 

VI. 

The Education of the Race. 

Our next step is to see that what is true of the 
education of the individual is true of the education 
of the race. The individual man is capable of de- 
velopment from the cradle to the grave. Now, this 
is equally true of the race as a whole. There is a 
capacity of continual development, each generation 
incorporating into itself the results of the preceding 
generation's development. 

The power by which the present ever gathers 
into itself the results of the past makes the human 
race, as it were, a colossal mai^, whose life reaches 
on for thousands of years. The successive genera- 
tions of men are days in this man's life. The dis- 
coveries and inventions of the different epochs are 
HIS works. The creeds and doctrines and opinions 
and principles are his thoughts. The states of 
society at different times are his manners. He 
grows in knowledge, in self-control, in visible size, 



GOD'S TEACHING. 159 

just as we do. And his education is, in the same way 
and for the same reason, precisely the same as ours.'* 

We may then rightly speak of a childhood and 
youth and manhood of the human race. The men 
of the earliest ages were but children as compared 
with us. They required a lower and more element- 
ary teaching ; less demand upon their self-control; 
more allowance to he made for their failures and 
their sins. They were in the lower classes of the 
great school of God. 

YII. 
The School of God. 

If I have at all succeeded in my object, the reader 
will now have reached the idea of God^s gradual, 
progressive method of educating humanity, and he 
will be ready to take a truer view of the morality 
of the Bible. 

The Bible, or rather the Old Testament, must no 
longer be regarded as a mere set of precepts and 
examples applicable to all cases and for all time. It 
must be regarded rather as the story of this gradual 
education in nobleness, in religion ; the patient, 
Divine building up of the kingdom of God. The Old 
Testament tells how a special nation was trained ; 

^ See Temple, Education of the World, Essays and Reviews, 
p. 3. 



160 



PR00RE88IYENE88 OF 



how the impulses of a poor degraded slave-race 
coming out of Egypt were checked and guided 
and chastened and elevated by a slow and gradual 
process ; how God watched over them as the refiner 
of silver over the crucible, slowly and patiently 
"purging their dross and taking away their tin." 

It tells of His plan of progressive education, like 
that of the ideal slum teacher in our illustration ; 
how many things in the early days were overlooked 
or "winked at" (as the Authorized Version badly 
puts it) ; ^ how slavery was not at once swept away, 
but its cruelties forbidden and its abuses checked ; 
how divorcing of wives was not absolutely prohib- 
ited, but laid under stringent regulations, so that it 
could no more be a mere matter of careless whim ; 
how the wild national customs of rei-enge were kept 
in check by the use of the cities of refuge, giving 
time for the moderating of the avenger's passion. 

It shows how the kindly spirit of gentleness and 
forbearance and care for others' interests grew 
into their legislation by the inspiring of the Holy 
Spirit. It shows that their idea of God was often 
crude and imperfect, like that of our children when 
their teaching has but begun. It shows real piety 
and earnestness of moral purpose involved with 
imperfect and inadequate forms of faith and mis- 
taken notions as to the will of God. It shows in 
i Acts xvii. 30. 



OOD'S TEACHING. 161 

each age the teaching coming just as it was needed, 
not too fast or too slow ; adapting itself to the ques- 
tions and conditions of the age, keeping always well 
ahead of the times to which it came, but not too far 
ahead for the people to follow. In a word, it shows 
to any careful reader the gradual development of 
religious thought, the continual progress from the 
early inadequate notions of God and right and duty, 
to the full moral beauty of the teaching of Jesus 
Christ. 

Should the reader have any doubt of this develop- 
ment of God's teaching, he can learn it beyond all 
question in the words of Our Lord,^ "Ye have heard 
that it was said to them of old time. Thou slialt 
love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy ; but I 
say unto you, Love your enemies ; do good to them 
that hate you." "Moses, for the hardness of your 
hearts," j)ermitted divorce on certain easy condi- 
tions, " but I say unto you that he who putteth 
away his wife save for the cause of fornication com- 
mitteth adultery ; " and again, when the indignant 
disciples wanted to call down fire, " as Elijah did," 
upon those who had slighted their Master, they were 
sternly taught that the spirit of Elijah was not the 
Spirit of Christ ; that they belonged to a higher 
stage of the spiritual education. 

Let us remember that it is the Bible itself which 

^ See Revised Version, Matt. v. 21. 
11 



162 



PR0QRE88IVENE88 OF 



has taught us to judge of the morality of its earlier 
teaching. " This very fact, that we are able to judge 
the imperfection of the Old Dispensation by a more 
advanced standard, shows how effectually through 
all these ages of patient education the Spirit of Truth 
has pursued His work. The conclusive logic of facts 
shows that the Divine policy of Revelation has been 
successful.^' " Do not ask," says St. Chrysostom, 
" how these Old Testament precepts can be good 
now, when the need for them is past ; ask how they 
were good when the period required them. Their 
highest praise is, that we now see them to be de- 
fective ; for if they had not trained us well, so that 
we became susceptible of higher things, we should 
not have now seen their deficiency." 



VIII. 
Back to the Moral Difficulties. 

I said that I would bring my reader back to the 
moral difficulties again as soon as I had put him in 
the right position to judge of them. 

I have already insisted on the right of the human 
conscience to criticise the lives and words of the 
men of the Bible. But, after what has been said, 
the reader must see what allowances we have to 
make in criticising them. We have reached a higher 
stage than that of Jael or Deborah, or Samuel or 



GOD'S TEACHING. 163 

Elijah, in God^s great ethical education of humanity. 
We are as men on the higher steps of that 

'" Great world's altar-stairs 
That lead through darkness up to God." 

Therefore, in criticising the words and acts of those 
on the lower stages, we must judge them by the 
stage at which they had arrived. The fact of the 
lower stage does not at all deny to them the inspira- 
tion of the Holy Spirit. If I have got my reader to 
grasp the idea of religion as a constant education of 
humanity, a gradual development onward, a growth 
of the human up towards* the Divine by the in- 
dwelling of a mysterious Divine Spirit ever urging 
man towards God, he will see that a lower conception 
of God and Right and Duty three thousand years 
ago was quite compatible with Divine inspiration. 
He will understand that even Moses and Samuel 
and David may have had, on some points, lower 
spiritual conceptions than some of the children in 
our Sunday-schools to-day, and yet that their con- 
ceptions were so far above those of the people whom 
they taught that only a divine inspiration could 
account for them. 

It is not, of course, that God^s laws of right and 
wrong have in any degree changed any more than 
the laws that govern the motions of the Universe. 
It is only that, as in the one case so in the other, they 



164 PR00RE8S1VENE8S OF 

have been but gradually and progressively revealed 
to men as they were able to bear them. " The 
faults of the Old Testament are, as Herder said, the 
faults of the pupil, not of the teacher. They are 
the necessary incidents of a course of moral educa- 
tion ; they are the unavoidable limitations of a par- 
tial and progressive Revelation. If God chooses to 
enter on a historic course of Revelation, then that 
Revelation must be accommodated to the necessities 
and limited by the capacities, mental and moral, of 
each successive age." * 

If this law of gradual growth be kept steadily in 
mind, the moral difficulties of the Old Testament 
will in a great measure disappear. Let us go back 
to the instances already given at p. 149, and see how 
they look now from our new point of view. 

(1) We find in early days a less perfect concep- 
tion of God. He is great and powerful, greater than 
all gods ; He loves righteousness, He hates iniquity ; 
but He is often regarded as only the God of the 
Israelite nation, not seeming to care at all for 
any people beside. Yet there are glimpses of higher 
truth, such as His care for Nineveh, His dealings 
w^ith the Arabian Job, and especially His word that 
in the promised Seed " should all the nations of the 
earth be blessed." Gradually the horizon widened 
with the prophets. But it was not until after the 
^ Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light. 



GOD'S TEACHING. 165 

coming of Christ that the old imperfection was 
finally done away, and Jehovah was revealed as 
the Father of all men, the God " who willeth all 
men to be saved." 

(2.) We find in the Psalms the lofty moral teach- 
ings and burning aspirations after God and holiness 
now and then marred by the stern prayer for 
j^unishment on those who sin against God, some- 
times even on those by whom the Psalmist was 
oppressed. But the difficulty vanishes as we re- 
member the law of growth. These prayers are not 
mere utterances of selfish spite, they are the claim 
which righteous Israel makes upon God that he 
would vindicate His justice. But it was in an age 
when this life was regarded as the scene in which 
God must finally vindicate Himself. It was in an 
age that did not clearly distinguish between the 
sin and the sinner — an age when moral indignation 
and stern, uncompromising hatred of villainy showed 
itself in invoking vengeance on the villain as the 
enemy of the God who hates all villainy. We see 
that we are judging men in the lower stages of the 
gradual building up of the Kingdom of God. We 
see, too, that there is a human element in the Bible, 
that the ore, however rich, is not all pure gold. 

(3) We find such institutions as slavery and 
polygamy and divorce, not, mark you, by any means 
commended or even encouraged, but borne with and 



166 PB0ORE88IVENES8 OF 

restricted, and gradually purified by the steadily 
increasing influence from on high. 

(4.) We find actions approved of or mentioned 
without blame which we, in the purer light of 
Christianity, must regard as blameworthy. Take, 
for instance, the case referred to, of the commenda- 
tion of Jael by the Amazon prophetess of Israel. 
Many ingenious explanations have been given, such 
as that JaeFs act might have been in defence 
against a personal outrage of Sisera, or that Debo- 
rah might not have been really inspired, or that 
the narrative in the Scripture does not neces- 
sarily commend the act of Jael, etc., etc. I see no 
reason for such conjectures, and no necessity for 
them either, if the reader has followed what has 
been already said. Deborah spoke as a "proph- 
etess," but as a prophetess enlightened with only a 
small portion of that Divine Light which was to 
go on brightening ever more and more "unto the 
perfect day." 

"Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, 
curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof." So sang 
Deborah. Was it to gain some personal end, to 
gratify some personal spite ? Nothing of the kind : 

"She was a 'mother in Israel,' and with the fervour of a 
mother's heart and the vehemency of a patriot's love, she had 
shot the light of love from her eyes and poured the blessings 
of love from her lips on the people who had ' jeoparded their 
lives to the death' against the oppressors, and the bitterness 



QOD'8 TEACHING, 167 

awakened and borne aloft by the same love she precipitated 
in curses on the selfish and coward recreants who ' came not 
to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the 
mighty.' As long as I have the image of Deborah before my 
eyes, and while I throw myself back into the age, country, 
and circumstances of this Hebrew Boadicea, in the yet not 
tamed chaos of the spiritual creation; as long as I contem- 
plate the impassioned, high-souled, heroic woman in all the 
prominence and individuality of will and character, I feel as 
if I were among the first ferments of the great affections —the 
proplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against 
and yet towards the outspread wings of the Dove that lies 
brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well, all replete 
with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate 
I am made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer 
radiance which shines on a Christian's path, neither blunted 
by the preparatory veil nor crimsoned in its struggle through 
the all-enwrapping mist of the world's ignorance ; whilst in 
the self-oblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, their 
elevation above low individual interests ; above all, in the 
entire and vehement devotion of their total being to the 
service of their Divine Master, I find a lesson of humility, a 
ground of humiliation, and a shaming, yet rousing, example 
of faith and fealty." ^ 

And if from Deborah we turn to Jael, we must 
use the same key to solve our diflSculties : the low- 
ness and imperfection of moral perceptions in those 
earlier days of the world's education. 

Here was one of these imperfect acts of heroism, 
those deeds of mingled good and evil which have so 
often won high praise in troublous times. The 
daring, the self-sacrifice, the devotion that would 
risk everything to deliver Israel from the tyrant, 
* Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. 



168 FB00RE88IVENE88 OF 

these were of God even though mingled with 
treachery that a higher morality must sternly con- 
demn. How easily we might even praise her our- 
selves perhaps, if we knew all the circumstances, 
and if the story were not in sacred but in secular 
history. " We do not condemn the Greeks, accord- 
ing to the light which they had, for praising Har- 
modius and Aristogiton in their plot against the 
tyrant of Athens. We ourselves are almost inclined, 
in consideration of the greatness of the necessity 
and the confusion of the time, to praise the murder 
of Marat by Charlotte Corday, * the angel of assas- 
sination,' as she has been termed by an historian of 
unquestioned humanity. Why should we not be as 
indulgent to the characters of Jewish history as we 
are to those of Greek or French history ? " ^ 
Dr. Arnold has well put this case of Jael : — 

"The spirit of the commendation of Jael is, that God 
allows largely for ignorance where He finds sincerity; that 
they who serve Him honestly up to the measure of their 
knowledge are, according to the general course of His prov- 
idence, encouraged and blessed ; that they whose eyes and 
hearts are still fixed on duty, and not on self, are plainly 
that smoking flax which He will not quench, but cherish 
rather until it be blown into a flame. . . . When we read 
some of those sad but glorious martyrdoms where there were 
good men — alas, the while, for human nature ! — both amongst 
the victims and the executioners, amidst all our unmixed 
admiration for the sufferers, may we not in some instances 
hope and believe that the persecutors were moved with a 
most earnest though an ignorant zeal, and that, like Jael, 

* Stanley, Jewish Church, vol. i. Lect. xiv. 



GOD'S TEAGHINO. 169 

they sought to please God, though, like her, they essayed to 
do it by means which Christ's Spirit condemns ? . . . Eight 
and good it is that we should condemn the acts of many of 
those commended in the Old Testament, for we have seen 
what prophets and righteous men for many an age were not 
permitted to see ; but no less right and needful it is that we. 
should imitate their fearless zeal, without which we in our 
knowledge are without excuse ; with which they, by means 
of unavoidable ignorance, were even in their evil deeds 
blessed." ^ 



IX. 
The Danger of Ignoring Progressive Teaching. 

This historical view of the Bible, as not a set of 
perfect precepts applicable to all time, but as the 
story of God's gradual education of humanity, is an 
absolute necessity for him who would understand 
its teaching. It has been sadly ignored in the past, 
and with most deplorable results to the cause of 
religion. "It is grievous to recall how many a 
blood-stained page of history might have been re- 
deemed from its agony and desolation if men had 
only remembered that the law of the Old Testament 
was as yet an imperfect law, and the morality of 
the Old Testament a not yet fully enlightened 
morality. When the sanguinary maintainers of 
shibboleths defended their outrages by the in- 
junctions of the Pentateuch ; when the treacher- 

* Arnold's Sermons, vi. 86, quoted in Jewish Church, Lect. 
xiv. 



170 PROGRESSIVENESS OF 

ous and infamous assassinations of kings by a 
Jacques Clement or Ravaillac were justified by the 
examples of Ehud and Jael ; when the Crusaders 
thought they did God service by wading bridle- 
deep in the blood of ' infidels ' because they could 
refer to the exterminating wars of the Book of 
Judges ; when the examples of Samuel and Elijah 
were quoted to sanction the hideous cruelties of 
the Inquisition ; when the ruinous institutions of 
polygamy and slavery were supported by the records 
of the early patriarchs ; when texts extravagantly 
strained were made the buttress of immoral des- 
potism ; when innocent poor women were burned 
as witches on the authority of a text in Leviticus ; 
when atrocious crimes like the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew were hailed by Popes with acclamation and 
paralleled to the olden heroes' zeal for God '^ ' — all 
these follies and iniquities could never have occurred 
if men had studied the Bible as they ought ; if they 
had rightly understood the teaching of Christ, that 
the revelation of God was progressive, that even the 
moral conceptions of the inspired saints and heroes 
of the Old Testament when compared with the fuller 
light of the new dispensation were but 

'' As moonlight unto sunlight, 
And as water unto wine. " 

' Farrar's Introduction to the Pulpit Commentary, p. vi. 



GOD'S TEACHING. 171 

And it is being sadly ignored in the present too, 
and with results scarcely less disastrous to the 
cause of truth. There is many a thoughtful Chris- 
tian whose faith in God and in his Bible is being 
slowly undermined by such Old Testament diffi- 
culties as Deborah's approval of JaeFs treachery 
or the vengeful prayers that appear in the Psalms. 
There is many an uneasy question as to the Divine 
permission of slavery and polygamy ; many a puzzled 
comparison between the God who so loved the world 
that He gave His only-begotten Son and the tribal 
Deity of the Old Testament who only patronized a 
particular race. Men must be taught that the con- 
ception of God and the conception of morality were 
but gradually formed. The earlier ideas were to the 
later but as the child^s idea to that of the philoso- 
pher. The child's idea is fittest for the child, but 
too crude for the more fully developed mind of the 
philosopher. 

Read the Bible with this historic view of its mean- 
ing and purpose, and it will reveal to you ever more 
and more the wisdom and patience of God in the 
education of the world. Read it without its his- 
torical perspective, as so many people do ; "look 
upon the biblical revelation as a plane surface, with- 
out depth and distance, and you cannot gain a much 
truer conception of the Divine wisdom in it than you 
could of the glory of God in the heavens if you 



172 PR0OEE88IVENE88 OF 

should regard the sky as a flat surface in which the 
stars are fixed, forgetting the vast astronomical dis- 
tances and the grouping of worlds and the harmony 
of all." 

When, therefore, we hear the taunt of the infidel 
as to some moral difficulty of the Old Testament, 
"This is the Christian teaching about God, about 
conduct, etc. ; it must be so, I find it in the Bible,'^ 
we must be careful how we accept it. Since the 
teaching in the Bible has been a progressive reve- 
lation, it would hardly be fair to put us down in one 
of the cruder and more elementary stages, and say, 
"Behold your God. Behold your religion." We 
bring the Old Testament to Christ as we bring our- 
selves to Him ; we test its teaching by His, and 
where it seems to us to fall below what He would 
command, we decline to accept it as an adequate 
statement of our religion. 

X. 

Objections and AnswerSo 

I have tried here to " put myself in the place ^' 
of my reader, and, by discussing the question with 
people of different minds, to anticipate the chief 
difficulties that might be felt about this chapter. 

Objeetion I. — " It is dangerous and presumptuous 



GOD'S TEACHING. 173 

to allow that conscience may judge as to the relative 
value of different parts of the Bible. Who are we to 
pick and choose amongst the words of inspiration ? '^ 

If what has been said already does not answer 
this objection, I shall but remind my objector that, 
whether it be presumptuous or no, it is exactly what 
he and all sensible readers of the Bible are continu- 
ally doing. He rises from the study of the Psalmists 
feeling that he ought to love and trust and praise 
his God as enthusiastically as they, but he never 
thinks that he should also pray for God^s vengeance 
against sinners that rebel against Him. He reads 
the two precepts, " Little children, love one another,'^ 
and " that they should keep themselves from things 
strangled and from blood. ^^ One of them he knows 
is of universal obligation, the other he would have 
no hesitation in ignoring. 

Conscience must discriminate. The Bible cannot 
be studied to any profit without the help of the 
Spirit of God, and the organ through which He 
acts is the human conscience. This is one reason 
why it is so needful to connect Bible-reading with 
prayer for the aid of the Holy Ghost. He must 
lead us into all truth. His function was not ended 
with the inspiration of the writers. He has to be 
still the indwelling, energizing power in His Church 
and in its individuals, " taking of the things of 
Christ, and showing them unto us.'^ 



^ 



174 PR00RE88IVENE88 OF 



Objection 11. — " If some of the Old Testament is to 
be regarded as imperfect and too elementary for the 
guidance of Christians to-day, may not men by and 
by say the same of the Kew Testament, and look 
back on its teaching also as but adapted to a lower 
stage of the spiritual education ? " 

Well, reader, there need be no "if " about some 
of the Old Testament teaching. Our Lord Himself 
tells us that it was not perfect as compared with the 
higher standard which He brought to earth. And 
as to the objection that men may by and by speak 
similarly of the New Testament, it will be time 
enough to think of that when the Christian world 
has approached within measurable distance of its 
lofty standard. We have now had it before us for 
nineteen centuries. Christianity in our day is prob- 
ably nearer to the beautiful ideal there set before 
us than at any period since apostolic days, and yet 
in no nation, in no individual, has it ever even nearly 
attained to it. We can conceive nothing higher. 
We are still pressing forward towards it, but still 
it remains far away above us and beyond us. 

In comparing the Old Testament with the New, it 
must always be remembered that between them lies 
the central fact of the world's history — the Incarna- 
tion of Christ. All that came before it was but pre- 
paring for it ; all that came after was the interpre- 
tation and application of it. 



OOD'S TEACHING. 175 

The Old Testament was preparatory ; the New 
Testament is final. The Old Testament teaching, 
noble and beautiful as it is, is not perfect. It is the 
growth of many centuries, the long, gradual lighten- 
ing towards the perfect day, when, in the fulness of 
time, God should send forth His Son. Then came 
the New Testament teaching, not gradually and as 
a mere advance upon the Old, but suddenly, at a 
bound, in all its brightness, so far above the level of 
the world to which it came, that now, after nineteen 
centuries of aiming and pressing towards it, it is still 
as the sun in the heavens above us. " Let mental 
culture,'^ says Goethe, "go on advancing, let the 
natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, 
let the human mind expand as it may, it will never 
go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Chris- 
tianity as it glistens and shines forth in the Gospel 
of Christ.^' 

Ohjection III. — " Why then need we study the Old 
Testament at all if its teaching be elementary and 
imperfect? May we not safely neglect it for the 
higher teaching of the New ? ^' 

Any such objection would indicate a very false 
notion of the value of the Old Testament and of its 
relation to the New — a notion very different from 
that of our Lord and His apostles, as evidenced by 
their use of the Old Testament Scriptures. True, 



176 PBOQBESSIVENESS OF 

the Old Testament is to be regarded as preparatory 
to the New. But not preparatory as a scaffolding 
that may be removed, but rather as a foundation 
that .shall endure for ever. 

The New Testament teaching is not a setting 
aside, but a development of the more rudimentary 
teaching of the Old. For example, the Old Testa- 
ment laws against the outward acts of murder and 
adultery are but developed in the New into their 
higher stages : a man must not hate his brother ; a 
man must not indulge impurity of thought. The 
New Testament history is not a new history, but a 
continuation of the Old, the story of the full accom- 
plishment of that which the whole Old Testament 
was preparing for and looking for. 

The New Testament, therefore, cannot be fully 
understood except in connection with the Old. 
Its record of the fulfilment of prophecies needs for 
its study the knowledge of these prophecies. Its 
lofty stage of spiritual teaching needs the thought 
of the long gradual preparation for such teaching, 
while the whole continued view of man's progressive 
education reveals to us the working of the one Di- 
vine purpose, and declares to us the wisdom and the 
patience of God. 

The Old Testament and the New cannot be sepa- 
rated. Both are united for ever in Christ. He 
stands, as it were, between them, and lays His hand 



GOD* 8 TEACHING. 177 

upon them both. He recognizes that the Old is 
imperfect and preparatory. But He will not allow 
it to be depreciated nor laid aside. "Think not 
that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets : 
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. ^^ He takes 
the old rudimentary teaching and gives it back to 
us, deepened, spiritualized, transfigured. He takes 
the old prophecies and tells us " they are they which 
testify of Me."' He shows that the whole Old Testa- 
ment leads up to Him, and then puts it back in our 
hands as a completed whole. "He bids us study it as 
' fulfilled in Him.' The old lesson-book is not to be 
thrown away or kept merely as an archaeological curi- 
osity. It is to be re-studied in the light of the fuller 
revelation of Christ's life and teaching and work/' 

Yes, the Bible is one, and all its parts are essential 
to the perfection of the whole. It has been com- 
pared to a great church which it needed some fifteen 
centuries to build. " Of that temple the Old Testa- 
ment is the nave, with its side aisles of psalm and 
prophecy, and the Gospels are the choir — the last 
Gospel perhaps the very Sanctuary — while around 
and behind are the Apostolic Epistles and the Apoc- 
alypse, each a gem of beauty, each supplying an 
indispensable feature to the majestic whole. '" ^ 

^ Canon Liddon, quoted in Kirkpatrick's Divine Library of 
the Old Testament, to which book I desire to acknowledge my 
obligations for some thoughts in the above section. 
12 



178 PBOOBESSIVENESS OF 

XI. 
Conclusion. 

It was necessary in this chapter to emphasize the 
progressiveness of God^s teaching and the fact that 
the Old Testament is inferior to the New. And yet 
when I think of the magnificent soul-stirring words 
even of the early Old Testament, I feel almost 
ashamed of such a chapter of apologies. To explain 
half a score of instances of inferior morality in the 
Old Testament, I seem to have written as if there 
were no such glory and beauty and grandeur as 
makes the Old Testament, as the product of such an 
age, the greatest miracle of history. 

When I turn to read in it the story of God^s 
gradual schooling, what a marvellous story it is ! 
what a proof it affords of its own inspiration ! 

When I look at the unwillingness of this people 
to be trained, it seems to me all the more wonderful 
still. 

When I turn to the secular history of the world 
at the time when the Psalms were written, even at 
the lowest date that criticism may assume ; when I 
read of its filthiness and depravity, of its worship of 
images and fetishes, of its degraded conception of God 
and duty ; and when I place that history beside my 
Bible open at the Book of Psalms, it seems to me 
that the veriest infidel should be overwhelmed by 



GOD'S TEAGHINO, I79 

the contrast. Listen to the words of passionate 
contrition, the prayers for forgiveness, the longings 
after God and purity and holiness of life, the 
bounding joy in the goodness of Jehovah, the knowl- 
edge of Him as " the Holy One of Israel ; " the 
Father pitying His children, the God " full of com- 
passion and mercy, long-suffering and of great good- 
ness, who knoweth whereof we are made, who re- 
membereth that we are but dust." 

How can men escape the stirring influence of such 
words and the miracle of their production at that 
age of the world ! How can men in the very presence 
of God's glory act the cool and captious critic of 
Coleridge, ''who," he says,' "the moment after I 
had been pouring forth all the love and gladness of 
my soul while book after book was passing across 
my memory, law and truth and example, oracle and 
lovely hymn and song of ten thousand thousands, 
and accepted prayers of saints and prophets sent 
back as it were from heaven, like doves to be let 
loose again with a new freight of spiritual joys and 
griefs and necessities, should coldly ask me in the 
first pause of my voice whether I had forgotten the 
difficulty about Deborah's blessing or the imprecatory 
verses that occur in the Psalms ! " 

^ The passage occurs in the Confessions of an Inquiring 
Spirit, but I have taken the liberty of slightly altering it to 
suit my purpose. 



CHAPTER VI. 

INSPIRATION AND THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:'' 

I. 
The Higher Criticism. 

The " Higher Criticism/^ as it is called, means the 
scientific investigation into the authorship, dates, 
sources, and composition of the books of the Bible, 
and into the sj)ecial circumstances, if any, which 
called them forth. It is a comparatively new branch 
of Biblical study. It is called the Higher or Kewer 
Criticism to distinguish it from the lower and older 
textual criticism, which occupies itself with the 
accuracy of the " text " and the means by which 
errors in it may be discovered and corrected. 

The reader may remember a rather foolish dis- 
cussion a few years ago as to the authorship of 
Shakespeare^s plays, in which it was sought to be 
shown that not Shakespeare but Bacon was really 
the author. This may serve as an illustration of 
"higher criticism run wild.^^ But there is a legi- 
timate and valuable higher criticism applied to 
Shakespeare, which to Shakespearian scholars is full 
of interest. Certain plays, such as Titus Andronicus, 



THE ' ' HIGHER CRITICISM. " 181 

bound up with his works, are, for one reason or 
another, suspected not to be from the pen of Shake- 
speare at all. Their style and language and ideas 
are critically examined, and their diiference from 
his acknowledged works is pointed out. Then in 
other cases most interesting discussions are carried 
on as to the original sources from which he drew 
certain of his plots and characters. References to 
contemporary writers, too, explain many an obscure 
saying and many a local reference, and thus give 
new meaning and vividness to the author's work. 
ISTo doubt there are often very foolish guesses and 
considerable amusement over certain " mares' nests " 
discovered by enthusiastic students. But, on the 
whole, it is a valuable instrument of knowledge, and 
has added considerably to the interest and enjoyment 
of Shakespeare. 

Now, something like this is what in the theo- 
logical world Higher Criticism proposes to do for 
the Bible. Its students, if questioned about the 
aim and object of their work, would say that there 
are certain books of the Bible which bear on the 
face of them marks of having been compiled, or at 
least founded on earlier lost documents ; that others 
which have no such mark, yet, in their opinion, show 
traces of having at least passed through the hands 
of literary " editors " or " redactors," who have either 
collected them in certain groups or completed their 




182 INSPIRATION AND 

unfinished narratives, or in some other way modified 
the original work. They say, also, that the careful 
study of some books gives reason to doubt that they 
were written by the author whose name they bear. 

Their reason for so examining Scripture is, they 
would tell you, reverence for the books of God, and 
the desire to throw all the light they can upon them. 
They consider that the books gain largely by being 
placed in their right " historical setting," and by the 
knowledge of the time and the circumstances and 
the reasons which, humanly speaking, called them 
forth. 

But, the reader will ask, how can they possibly 
learn anything about the matter now, especially in 
the Old Testament, on which their chief attention is 
directed, when so many centuries have passed by 
and ancient history is silent on the subject ? They 
learn, they would reply, much in the same way as 
our Shakespearian or other literary critics do. By 
a close study of the language in its different periods 
they can distinguish a late writer from an earlier, as 
we would distinguish an English writer of the nine- 
teenth century from one of the fourteenth. By 
accurate study of a writer's style and phrases and 
mannerisms, they can notice if the hand of a different 
writer occurs in the book, as our literary scholars 
would if they found the works of Burns with some of 
Tennyson's poems bound up amongst them. Then, 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 183 

again, an author often helps them by his local colour- 
ing, or by his mention of things or customs which be- 
longed to a particular age or country, or by any passing 
references to contemporary history. All these things 
assist them in forming their judgment about a psalm 
or history or other literary production in the Bible. 



II. 

Illustrations of the Higher Criticism. 

Perhaps I had better illustrate by a simple speci- 
men. The reader has probably heard of this science 
chiefly in connection with the discussion about the 
Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, one of the 
most widely known of critical questions. It will 
serve as an example as well as any other. Of course, 
I have no intention of taking any side in it here, or 
entering .into it any farther than is necessary to 
illustrate what is meant by the Higher Criticism. 

The Pentateuch, which is held by the Jews as 
superior to and more sacred than any other part of 
the Old Testament, was always considered by them 
too sacred to be the subject of critical inquiries. 
No one thought of raising questions as to its author- 
ship or composition, or when it was written. It was 
commonly believed that Moses wrote it in the very 
form in which it appears to-day. However, it struck 



184 INSPIRATION AND 

some people as strange that it should have men- 
tioned Moses' death^ and that he was *'very meek," 
and say that " no man knoweth his sepulchre unto this 
day''' and " there arose not a prophet since in Israel 
like unto Moses." Also, that the writer should seem 
to be continually looking back to the time " while 
the children of Israel were in the wilderness " or 
" the Canaanite was still in the land ; '^ that the 
eastern countries should be described as " beyond 
Jordan," showing that the writer lived in Palestine, 
west of Jordan ; that to establish a question of 
geography, it should quote, as from some ancient 
authority, the "Book of the Wars of the Lord,^' 
which certainly could not have been earlier than 
the days of Moses ; and other difficulties of a similar 
kind. So in the infancy of Biblical criticism the 
question was started, "On what authority does 
this belief rest, that Moses is the author of these 
books in their present finished form ? " And it 
appeared that no answer could be given except 
that the Jewish Church seemed to have always be- 
lieved it. Therefore critics thought themselves at 
liberty to question the Mosaic authorship of the 
Pentateuch, or at least to suggest that the writings 
of Moses might have been only the rough material, 
or part of the material, which was worked up by 
later authors or " editors" into "The Five Books." 
It was clear enough that Moses had written a 



THE '^niGHER CRITICISMS ]85 

Lawbook, however large or small it might be ; ^ that 
he had been directed to " write in the book '^ the 
account of the war with Amalek ; that he recorded 
the journeyings of the children of Israel ; tliat after 
he had written this Law he delivered it to the 
custody of the priests, directing that it should be 
read before all the people every seven years on the 
Feast of Tabernacles, and that it should be placed 
in the side of the ark that it might be preserved 
as a witness against the people. But, clearly, it 
does not necessarily follow from all this that Moses 
wrote the whole Pentateuch in its present form. 

This, then, is on^ of the questions about the 
Pentateuch on which the Higher Criticism has been 
spending much of its force. Was Moses the auth n- 
of every line of the Pentateuch, from the beginning 
of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy ? But there 
is another question which gives a better and more 
interesting illustration of the working of the new 
science. It is a question not of authorship but of 
composition. Were any or all of the books of the 
Pentateuch composed j^artly of documents existing 
before the time of Moses ? 

It w^as about the middle of the last century that 

this question first received anj^ serious attention. 

A French physician named Astruc called attention 

to the fact that Genesis i. to ii. 3 is a connected 

* See Josliiui viii. 32. 



186 INSPIRATION AND 

account of the Creation, and, according to his opinion, 
at the very next verse another separate account of 
it begins, as if tlie writer had bodily incorporated 
two separate narratives. These narratives, he con- 
sidered, were distinguished by certain differences of 
style, by difference in the order of events, and espe- 
cially by the peculiarity which first called his atten- 
tion to the matter, that in the one account the name 
for God is uniformly Elohim, and in the other 
uniformly Jehovah Elohim. This difference ( God 
and Lord God) is quite evident in the English 
Bible. A fuller investigation seemed to many to 
confirm the notion thus started that right through 
the Pentateuch there Avas a mingling of " Jehovis- 
tic " and " Elohistic " documents, together with cer- 
tain genealogies and lists, all which had been copied 
into his work bodily by the author or editor. This 
idea has been run to an absurd extreme since by 
German critics, but it is in the main accepted by 
the most prominent Biblical scholars. However, we 
have nothing to do here with its merits or demerits. 
We only give it as a very simple illustration of the 
questions of the "Higher Criticism." 

III. 

An Unreasonable Panic. 

However we may object to the positions some- 
times taken by its votaries, it is only fair to admit 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 187 

that a good many foolish and unjust things have 
been " said against tliis Higher Criticism. It is not 
very flattering to men's fiith in their Bible or their 
God, but it is true, all the same, that there was as 
great a panic over the Mosaic authorship of Genesis 
as if the foundation of the kingdom of God depended 
upon it. The work of the Higher Criticism is but 
to try to find out the truth about the books of the 
Bible, and men are only asked to believe what is 
fairly established. They are not bound to accept 
every extravagance and every unproved theory that 
foolish students of criticism may bring forward — 
only to prove all things, and hold fast that which is 
good. 

It is, therefore, unfair and uncharitable to speak 
of it as " an attack on the Bible,^' " an assault on our 
faith," etc. The fact really is, that there are certain 
difiiculties in the generally received literary beliefs 
about the Bible, such, for example, as I have just 
referred to in the case of the Pentateuch. It is not 
necessarily an attack on the Bible to suggest explana- 
tions of these, nor is it necessarily a praiseworthy 
position to refuse to think about them at all. 

It is a striking illustration of the power of tradi- 
tional beliefs that earnest holy men — men, too, of 
high intellectual attainments — should have branded 
this new study as " destructive criticism," " danger- 
ous," and " subversive of all belief in the Scriptures." 



188 INSPIRATION AND 

No doubt such epithets would apply to the reckless 
speculations of some of its students, but that is a 
different matter altogether. We are concerned, not 
with the reckless speculations, but with the residuum 
of proved truth that its investigations may bring 
to us. 

It is the old story of unreasoning panic whenever 
a traditional belief must be disturbed, no matter 
how slender the foundation on which it rests. We 
have seen it already in the questions about Verbal 
Inspiration and Infallibility, and Progressive Reve- 
lation, and the Human Element in Scripture. To 
overthrow the traditional beliefs was to overthrow 
inspiration itself. By degrees men began to see 
that God had nowhere guaranteed the truth of these 
traditional beliefs, and that inspiration was not at 
all affected by such matters. But it seems that 
that lesson needs to be learned afresh on every new 
occasion. People think now that it is subversive of 
belief to question the received date and authorship 
of certain Old Testament books. True, it is sub- 
versive of belief, but for the most part only of the 
traditional belief that the titles of the books are 
inspired of God, and that the books are to be re- 
ceived on the authority of certain writers^ names. 
Who told us that Moses wrote Genesis, or that 
Joshua and Samuel wrote the books called by their 
names ? Does the Bible tell us they wrote them ? 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 189 

Does it matter very much whether they did or not, 
except, perhaps, as a help towards settling the 
date? 

Even if they did write them, it is at least worth 
notice that they kept that fact to themselves. They 
did not tell us ; they did not claim our credence for 
the books on the ground that they had written them. 
Indeed, they intimated plainly by their silence that 
the authorship was a matter of little consequence to 
us. Ought we not to take that lesson to heart ? 

This does not mean that we must give up the 
traditional beliefs as to the authorship of certain 
books. The question is not. Are we right in our 
belief about the author's name ? but, Is the author's 
name of any serious importance ? Is the author's 
name, in the Old Testament at least, a matter of very 
serious moment to us ? Quite possibly criticism may 
ultimately but confirm our present beliefs as to the 
authors' names. But why should such vital import- 
ance be attached to them ? Look, for example, at 
the " Book of the Minor Prophets." In the Jewish 
canon it is one single book in which these short 
prophetic utterances are gathered together. We 
know nothing about these men. The scribe or coun- 
cil who gathered them together seems to have known 
little more than their fathers' names or the reigns 
in which they lived. Surely their names give 
no authority to the writing — rather the other 



190 INSPIRATION AND 

way/ Suppose that the book had been merely enti- 
tled " A Collection of Prophets," what odds would 
it have made to us ? Should we have been told that 
it was dangerous to our faith not to know their 
names ? 

We are told that it would be dangerous to our 
faith not to believe that Moses himself wrote the 
whole Pentateuch as it stands to-day. Why would 
it be dangerous not to believe that Moses wrote it, 
if we had reason to think that whoever wrote it had 
access to the necessary information ? Is it dan- 
gerous to our faith to believe that the greater 
number of the Psalms of David were never written 
by the " sweet singer of Israel," and that we cannot 
be at all sure which of them are his ? Is it danger- 
ous to our faith to know that the "Proverbs of 
Solomon " include those of Agur the son of Jakeh, 
and also those taught by King Lemuel's mother, 
whoever she may be ? Why can we not learn the 
lesson that is so patent in the Bible itself, that the 
books do not depend on the authority of their writers, 
but on the fact that they are inspired of God, and 

^ Is anj one, for instance, foolish enough to think that in the 
Homeric controversy the value of the poems would be altered if 
they were proved not to have been written by Homer? The 
poems are his only claim to greatness. We know nothing about 
him apart from them. The reader will perhaps remember Lewis 
Carroll's satirical conclusion, "that the Iliad was not really 
written by Homer, but by another man of the same name ! " 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 191 

that His Church was providentially guided in pre- 
serving those most profitable for doctrine, for re- 
proof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
ness ? 

IV. 

Dangers of the Higher Criticism. 

The reader may with some reason justify his 
distrust of the Higher Criticism by pointing to the 
rash speculations of some of its most advanced 
students within the past few years. I do not want 
in the smallest degree to minimize this objection. 
"From these critics we are aware," says an irate 
writer, ^' that Bibliolatry is possible ; but so also, we 
think, are flippancy and self-sufficiency." And his 
rebuke is justified. Amongst the men who sneer 
most contefmptuously at the foolish a priori assump- 
tions about verbal inspiration and infallible accuracy, 
there are many who come to the study of the Bible 
phenomena with just as strong a priori assumptions 
of their own. There are those who start with the 
theory that because supernatural interference is 
easily believed in the uneducated infancy of nations, 
therefore the supernatural in tlie early histories 
in the Bible must be set down to myth and 
legend, and be explained away somehow on natiiral 
grounds. There are hasty, impetuous men whose 



192 INSPIRATION AND 

tendency is to jump to rapid conclusions, and, 
without waiting for the slow testing of time, to 
announce these as " established results of criticism." 
There are those whose confidence in their individual 
critical instinct leads them to decide most important 
questions of date and authorship and structure of 
books merely by their own judgment of probability 
and style and character of an author^s mind.^ It 
seems to the critic that certain passages are not quite 
in the author's style of thought or expression, and 
therefore, without waiting for the judgment of other 
men quite as capable as himself, he calmly brackets 
these as " probable additions " or " interpolations by 
a later hand/' 

But this sort of work is not really scientific 
criticism at all, and scientific criticism should not 
bear the blame of it, however it may commend 
itself to some for its " boldness and freedoAi." Bold- 
ness and freedom are admirable in their place, but 
they may be very dangerous merits in dealing with 
the Bible if not held in check by caution and modesty 
and deep reverence for the Word of God. It is very 
easy in rooting up some tares to root up with them a 
good deal of wheat ; and men need to be very careful 

^ Fancy such a critic, a few centuries hence, examining the 
works of (let us say) Tennyson. How scornfully he would reject 
the opinion that the Northern CohUer was written by the author 
of In Ilemoriam ! 



THE '^ HIGHER GBITICISM:' 193 

in dealing with so complex and delicate a feeling as 
that veneration which has been growing for centuries 
around the Bible. 



V. 

The True Position of "Criticism." 

Our fear of over-boldness must not, however, land 
us in the opposite extreme. Our dislike of dangerous 
and baseless theories must not lead us to anathema- 
tize the Higher Criticism or judge uncharitably its 
thoughtful students. Rashness and hasty theo- 
rizing and crude guesses are dangers in every young 
speculative science, and, like all other dangers 
peculiar to youth, will probably lessen considerably 
as it grows older. We must remember that all 
the students of criticism are not rash and hasty. 
"VYe must remember that its object is to find out 
for us the truth, and only the truth, about our Bible. 
Surely in so far as it succeeds in this it deserves all 
encouragement, even if it overthrow many of the 
old strongholds of traditionalism which have become 
very dear to us. Truth can never overthrow any- 
thing but what deserves to be overthrown ; and, in 
any case, God^s will for us is to follow truth, wher- 
ever it lead and with whatever results. 

But this does not by any means imply that we 
are to accept as truth the decisions of specialists in 
13 



194 INSPIRATION AND 

Biblical criticism merely because they are their 
decisions. Let us bow with all deference to their 
learning and skill. Let us give them full credit for 
wishing to be candid and fair. But let us remember 
too that the decision of such difficult questions de- 
mands more than an accurate knowledge of Hebrew 
literature and history. It demands the possession of 
a well-balanced mind, and a broad judicial spirit. It 
demands the recognition of all the evidence of every 
kind, not merely of the special evidence with which 
experts are most conversant. It is therefore quite 
possible that a man should be deeply versed in 
Hebrew and philology and history, and well ac- 
customed to the investigations of criticism, and yet 
that he should be by no means competent to pro- 
nounce judicially on questions relating to the age 
and authorship and composition of the Old Testa- 
ment books. 

With all respect for the knowledge and ability of 
the critics, they should be reminded that their true 
position is in the witness-box, and not on the judicial 
tench. In our law courts it is often necessary to 
call in on both sides the aid of specialists in medi- 
cine, or engineering, or farming, or such like, and we 
know how conflicting their evidence frequently is. 
Their evidence may form the most important part 
of the material for a decision. But yet the decision 
is not intrusted to them. It is recoo^nized that 



THE '' HIGHER CRITIC ISM. 



195 



while the expert is best fitted to produce the evi- 
dence, he may not be best fitted to use it for forming 
a decision. Common-sense and freedom from bias, 
and a judicial spirit and experience of men^s motives 
and actions, and many other elements, come into the 
decision, which is consequently left to the jury or 
the judge. 

I^Tow, it is most important that this should be 
kept in mind. Whatever it may show as to their 
candour and fairness, it does not speak well for 
men^s steadiness and common-sense that they should 
so frequently accept extreme conclusions on little 
more than the ipse dixit of specialists. The very 
fact of their being specialists, it must be remem- 
bered, tends to a certain narrowness and partisan- 
ship, and over-belief in the powers of their critical 
faculty. It tends to exaggerating the importance of 
their own special evidence, and not giving sufficient 
weight to the many other considerations, such as 
the reality of the supernatural, the appeal to the 
spiritual nature, the uniqueness of Jewish history, 
the testimony of Christ and His apostles, and the 
tradition of the Jewish and Christian Churches for 
three thousand years. 

Let this fact be kept well before us, and we need 
have no fear for the result. Already there are 
signs of a more reasonable attitude on both sides, 
more modesty in the critics in formulating their 



196 INSPIRATIOlSf AND 

judgments, more fairness in the public in listening 
to them. The most important recent contribution 
to the subject is Professor Driver^s " Introduction to 
the Literature of the Old Testament," and in it 
he tries most carefully to give the grounds of his 
decisions, and to distinguish between what seem 
conclusive and what only probable proofs. This is 
the true way to conduct such inquiries. We may 
accept all the facts on which his judgments are 
founded. Many of these judgments we may entirely 
reject. The critic's superiority consists in his knowl- 
edge of the facts. In judging of their force, he can 
claim but little superiority over any intelligent 
scholar who is able to understand them. 

But, with these restrictions, let us welcome gladly 
all that the critics can teach us. " When criticism 
is reverent, when it does not assume that the super- 
natural is unhistorical, when it does not ignore the 
possibility that God can reveal Himself to man, and 
when it proceeds on the fair principles of historical 
investigation, it does not appear why Christian men 
should object to it.^^ It is a pitiful spirit that would 
try to muzzle criticism of the Bible by an outcry 
about the dangerous results that may follow. It 
is a sorry figure that Christians have cut over and 
over again in the past, opposing every new know- 
ledge in the supposed interests of religious truth, 
and then in nine cases out of ten trying to cover 



THE ''HiaHEB CRITICISM." 197 

their retreat as best tliey could. Let us not be 
content to cut that figure to-day. He who has real 
faith in God will never be afraid of truth. Remem- 
ber that God is able to take care of His truth, and 
which of us will venture to say that this Criticism 
may not be part of the method of doing so ? " If this 
work be of men, it will come to nought ; but if it be 
of God, ye cannot overthrow it." 

VI. 
Are its Results to be Feared ? 

This is an important question. " Advanced 
thinkers " sometimes seem to argue as if almost any 
admission might be made about the Bible without 
in the least affecting its credit or its inspiration. 
This is by no means so. There are clearly marked 
limits bej^ond which w^e cannot go. There are ad- 
missions which, if forced on us by evidence, would 
destroy the general credit of the Bible, and therefore 
its claim to inspiration in any sense. Is any such 
danger to be apprehended ? 

I think it is important first to remind ourselves 
of the probability that the ultimate results of these 
investigations in the Old Testament will be very 
much less important than we, in the midst of them, 
are now inclined to expect. We can look back on 
the similar investigations in the New Testament, 



198 INSPIRATION AND 

which caused very widespread disquiet some years 
ago. We have the works of Colenso, and "Essays 
and Reviews/^ and " Supernatural Religion " to re- 
mind us of the other " disquiets " through which our 
age has passed already. And now that the din of 
those controversies has ceased, we can see that all 
their loud positive statements and counter-state- 
ments have left behind them but a comparatively 
little residuum of established fact, and a compara- 
tively slight modification, and that for the better, of 
the views of men about God and the Bible. 

Doubtless the present investigations in the Old 
Testament will have more important results than 
those, but I think experience justifies us in expect- 
ing that many of the positions confidently held to- 
day will be abandoned and forgotten before the next 
generation. 

But even if it be not so — even if all but the most 
extreme of these critical theories should be estab- 
lished — there would still be nothing to fear for the 
position of the Bible. 

Let us take first the most advanced positions on 
which ^there is anything approaching to agreement 
amongst the students of criticism. 

Suppose it should be satisfactorily proved that 
Moses left but a large nucleus of the Pentateuch 
legislation, and that this was afterwards, like other 
codes of law, by duly accredited men, expanded and 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 199 

adapted to the altered circumstances of the people 
in Canaan. Suppose, even, that the final touches 
were not given to it until the days of the exile. I 
am not at all suggesting that this can be established. 
But what if it should be ? Could not God teach 
the nation gradually, and through many men, just 
as effectively as He could teach it all at once and 
by one man ? And He has nowhere told us that 
He has chosen one of these ways rather than the other. 
Suppose it should be proved that some writer in 
the Bible wrote under an assumed name, made some- 
one appear to be the author of a booK who was not 
the real author, as is believed to be the case in the 
Book of Ecclesiastes ? This is a serious question 
to face. Impatient people have scouted it angrily 
as a charging of forgery and fraud on the Holy 
Spirit. But impatient people cannot judge these 
questions. No doubt wilful deceit is incompatible 
with inspiration ; a forgery or fraud could not be 
inspired. If that should be proved of any book, I 
do not see how it could retain its place in the Bible. 
But it must be pointed out that forgery or fraud is 
not the theory suggested. It is asserted that the 
custom of putting certain teaching into the mouth 
of some prominent person was quite in accord with 
the literary customs and ethics of the day. If this 
be so, there would be little cause of disturbance in 
the fact of a writer usinsr another man's name. 



200 INSPIRATION AND 

I hesitate to speak of the other extreme position, 
that our Lord's referring to an Old Testament 
writing by the name of its author does not neces- 
sarily close for ever the question of its authorship. 
It seems rather to savour of irreverence to meddle 
with such a question on a mere supposition. And 
up to the j)resent nothing even approaching to 
evidence has been put forward. But if one ask 
whether, in the event of such being proved, there 
would be a serious danger to religious belief, the 
answer is that it is held by men about whose faith 
and devotion to Christ there can be no question. 
Some think that the Lord merely spoke of the books 
by their commonly known names, with no inten- 
tion of pronouncing a verdict as to their age and 
authorship ; others, that in His stooping to take 
human nature He " emptied Himself " of His omni- 
science as regards mere literary and intellectual 
questions. At any rate, they find no serious diffi- 
culty in the matter. 

If, then, even these, the most extreme theories put 
forward, are not destructive of religious beliefs, how 
much less those more moderate positions which seem, 
to have some likelihood of being finally established. 
If only the popular mechanical notions of inspiration 
be given up, we may receive such results of criticism 
with perfect equanimity. 

If, for example, it teach us that the early inspired 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISMS 201 

historians, instead of taking down the history of 
Israel with infallible correctness from the lips of 
God, had to use laboriously older histories and annals 
and records and chronologies, like any modern his- 
torian, and with the risk, too, that inaccuracies 
of detail might creep in from these materials into 
their work ; if it teach us that this sort of composi- 
tion comes under the head of inspired, as well as 
that in which an enrapt prophet records his vision 
or the thoughts directly given to his soul by God, 
what is there about all this to alarm or disturb us ? 
If we did not know before how the books were com- 
posed, ought we not to be thankful that somebody 
should teach us ? If our previous notions about in- 
spiration were wrong, is it not a very good thing for 
us to have them corrected? 

If it show good reason to believe that some of the 
traditional theories are incorrect as to the authors of 
certain books, even if it leave us in utter uncertainty 
as to who the authors really were, may it not be a 
good thing for us to learn that we had no business 
to believe in the inspiration of the titles of the books 
any more than in that of the marginal dates, and 
that the authorship of these books is in most cases a 
matter that is quite unimportant ? 

If it should prove to us that the Pentateuch is an 
editing of old Mosaic records, that it is of composite 
authorship, not all the work of a single writer ; or 



202 INSPIRATION AND 

if it should establish satisfactorily that what we call 
Isaiah xl.-lxvi. is really the prophecy of a " Great 
Unknown," whose work was by ancient scribes 
appended to that of Isaiah, as the proverbs of Agur 
and Lemuel are appended to those of Solomon — 
What if it should ? How is the real value of the 
Bible affected ? 

Or, again, if we are shown that some Old Testa- 
ment book was not really written within a century 
or two of the time we are accustomed to assign to 
it, what have we got to be alarmed about ? When 
God touches our hearts and rouses our con- 
sciences by the record of words which He inspired 
of old, what difference does it make whether 
they were written a few generations earlier or 
later ? 

Or if there be pointed out to us the dramatic 
setting of the Book of Job, the imaginative picture 
of Satan amid the sons of God holding converse 
with Jehovah, the poetry in which Job and his 
friends discuss the mysteries of life ; and if we are 
told that the study of Eastern poetry forces the 
belief that this is not all to be taken as literal fact, 
but as a poetical play founded on the patriarch's life, 
a dramatic setting for " The Mystery of Evil," does 
it not give a beautiful reasonableness to the book ? 
Could the Holy Ghost not teach men then by fiction 
and drama as our Saviour did later by the fiction of 



THE ''HIGHER GTtlTlGISMr 203 

the Prodigal Son and the dramatic presentation of 
Dives and Lazarus ? 



VII. 
A Reasonable Attitude. 

This, then, is the attitude we must adopt towards 
the Higher Criticism. Every fact that it can reason- 
ably establish — mark the word establish, not merely 
assert or conjecture — must be loyally, nay, gratefully 
received. For all truth is from God, and can never 
ultimately lead to anything but good. We must not 
"^presumptuously stake the inspiration of the Divine 
authority of the Old Testament on any foregone 
conclusion as to the method and shape in which 
the records have come down to us." We must be 
willing to listen candidly to all the evidence brought 
before us, but not be in too great a hurry in coming 
to a decision. We must have our candour and bold- 
ness tempered by revei-ence for the book we are 
dealing with, by modesty and caution in judging of 
evidence, by honest desire not to disturb without 
cause the treasured convictions of 'others. 

And we must be willing to give other men credit for 
being as honest as ourselves, and for caring as much 
for their God and their Bible. There must be no more 
of this uncharitable doubting of a man^s personal piety 
and honesty of purpose merely because he argues 



1 



204 INSPIRATION AND 

that Moses did not write the whole of the Penta- 
teuch or that the human element in Scripture is 
larger than we will admit. 

And, finally, there must be more faith in God and 
truth, and in the free workings of the Holy Spirit, 
and also, there must be more prayerful study of the 
Bible. The more a man " enters into the secret " of 
the Bible, the more convinced he will be of its Divine 
light and power, and the more certain that any criti- 
cal theory inconsistent with its inspiration must be 
false. It is a poor, pitiful thing, this constant fright 
and uneasiness of good people about the founda- 
tions of the kingdom of God whenever some new 
fact comes to light disturbing their old traditional 
beliefs. A change of our notions about the methods of 
God^s working cannot alter the fact that the working 
is there ; a revolution in our beliefs about the mode 
of inspiration cannot, surely, take away inspiration 
itself, any more than a correction in botanical systems 
could take away the beauty and perfume of the flowers. 

Thus calmly and confidently, without rashness on 
the one hand or prejudice on the other, we must use 
this science of Higher Criticism as one of God's good 
gifts to our generation to win for us larger views of 
truth. And thus using it, we shall have more reason 
to rejoice in our gains than to be frightened about 
our losses. 

There is a story of an ancient land where a fire 



THE ''HIGHER CRITICISM:' 205 

once swept over the hills, destro^ang the flowers and 
the foliage and changing the familiar aspect of the 
scene. But as the people were grieving for their 
loss they suddenly discovered that the lire which 
had destroyed the flowers and the foliage had 
opened by its heat deep fissures in the rocks, dis- 
closing to their view rich veins of silver. " Which 
things are an allegory." For if by this searching 
fire of criticism we lose some cherished traditional 
notions, we shall gain in a deeper knowledge of 
truth. We shall gain in knowledge of the nature 
and limits of inspiration and in understanding God^s 
methods of communication with men. We shall be 
guarded from many errors and misapprehensions that 
are turning men away from the Bible to-day. We 
shall learn more of the conditions under which the 
Bible was written, the moral and intellectual atti- 
tude of the writers, and the special circumstances, 
if any, which caused them to write. We shall better 
appreciate the modes of thought and expression, and 
judge better the moral and social condition of the 
times. We shall be able to " put ourselves in the 
place ^' of the ancient writer and his readers, and 
enter more easily into the feelings of both. And 
thus new life and colour will pass into the picture, 
the history will gain enormously in freshness and 
reality and vivid human interest, and the truths 
expressed will have a meaning for us such as they 
never had before. 



CHAPTER YII. 

CONCLUSION. 



Now, reader, we have come to the close of these 
" thoughts for the present disquiet." They have 
been but poor, imperfect thoughts. As so often 
happens with one's most enthusiastic projects, the 
fulfilment has fallen far short of the design. But 
let that pass. Let us glance back for a moment at 
the results of our study. 

We have examined the difficulties of our "dis- 
quieted thinker,'^ and found that many of them 
resulted from prejudice and mistake, from his hav- 
ing accepted without investigation many of the 
popular assumptions about the Bible. We have 
seen that the right way to make a theory of In- 
spiration is not by deciding beforehand what God 
Tntist have done, but by carefully examining the 
Bible to find out what He has done. In following 
this method we have been forced to modify some 
of our commonly held notions about the Bible. But 
I have tried to show you that there is nothing new 



CONCLUSION. 207 

and need be nothing disturbing in this, since these 
" popular notions," which we have found untenable, 
are repudiated by all educated theologians, and have 
no warrant or authority from the Bible or the Church. 
I trust that the insisting on this fact may be help- 
ful not only to the disquieted Christians for whom 
I write, but also to some honest infidels who may 
meet with this book, and find that after all they 
have been infidels by mistake ; that what they had 
been opposing and refuting as the Bible was only 
some unwarranted notion about it. 



II. 

Possibly to some reader the thoughts here pre- 
sented may be somewhat disturbing at first. There 
is always a certain disturbance in the readjustment 
of one's beliefs in a matter of such vital importance 
as this. AYe cannot in a moment accustom ourselves 
to a new point of view. But a little consideration 
will show that there is no reason for such feeling. 
The foundation of the Bible is no less firm than 
before ; nay, rather, it should be far more firm than 
when every new suggestion of the higher criticism, 
and every new fact that seemed in conflict with the 
infant sciences of ancient Israel, w^as sufficient to 
make men fear for the foundations of the kingdom 
of God. The authority of the Bible is no less. 



208 CONGL U8I0N. 

Its claims on our reverence and belief are no less. 
We have not found it to be less Divine. We have 
only got to understand better the nature and method 
of the Divine operation upon it. 

III. 

It is quite true that the view here presented will 
necessitate more trouble and more care in the study 
of the Bible. We can no longer take each verse as 
in itself a complete and definite proof-text on the 
matter it refers to. We must consider the context 
and the time in which the writer lived, and the cir- 
cumstances under which he wrote. We must bal- 
ance one part of Scripture with another. We must 
recognize that the Old Testament teaching is in parts 
lower than that of the New. We must build our 
beliefs less on isolated phrases or texts, and more 
on the general spirit of the Bible. And for all this 
there will be needed more thoughtfulness, more sus- 
pension of judgment, more modesty, more study, 
more prayer. 

But the outlay of these will be repaid a hundred- 
fold. The Bible, relieved from its incubus of human 
traditions, will shine forth for us more real, more 
natural, more Divine. Our beliefs will rest on a 
firmer foundation. The old quakings about the 
moral and intellectual difficulties will be over. And 



CONCLUSION. 



209 



though there may still be things that puzzle and 
perplex us, we shall learn that our Christian life 
does not depend on the understanding of all mys- 
teries and all knowledge, but on the humble child- 
like obedience to the will of God, which for all prac- 
tical purposes is clearly revealed. 



^ksseb Jforb, fol^o ^ast caitseb all ^olg ^criptnres to be forilten 
for our learning ; grant t^at foe man in snc^ foist l^ear i\}tm, reab, mark, 
learn, anb infoarblg bigcsl t^em, t^at bg paltenre, anb eomfort of t^g 
Polj) ®torb, foe mag cmbrarc, anb tber l^olb fast tl^c blesstb l^ope of 
cfacrlasting life, foljir^ Sljon ^ast giben ns in oar ^abionr |esus Christ, 
^men. 



THE END. 



4 



ID 84 












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